Abstract
We propose and analyze new finger replacement techniques for RAKE reception in the soft handover (SHO) region with multiple base stations. The proposed schemes are basically based on the block comparison among groups of resolvable paths and lead to the reduction of complexity while offering commensurate performance in comparison with previously proposed schemes. Relying on the newly derived analytical expressions, we investigate not only the complexity in terms of the average number of required path estimations/comparisons and the SHO overhead but also the error performance of the proposed scheme over independent and identically distributed fading channels.