Abstract
We propose and analyze new finger assignment techniques that are applicable for RAKE receivers in the soft handover (SHO) region. More specifically, in the SHO region, the receiver uses by default only the strongest paths from the serving base station (BS) and only when the combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) falls below a certain pre-determined threshold, the receiver uses more resolvable paths from the target BSs to improve the performance. Relying on the previous results for the case of two-BS case, we consider the multi-BS situation by attacking the statistics of several correlated generalized selection combining (GSC) stages and provide closed-form expressions for the statistics of the output SNR. By investigating the tradeoff among the error performance, the path estimation load, and the SHO overhead, we show through numerical examples that the new schemes offer commensurate performance in comparison with more complicated GSC-based diversity systems while requiring a smaller estimation load and SHO overhead.