Abstract
Macro diversity handover (MDHO) is the process by which the mobile station (MS) communicates with two or more access stations. The list of the access stations is called a diversity set. In this paper, we investigate the performance of an enhanced MDHO technique for TDD-OFDMA-based interference-limited multi-hop relay cellular networks. The enhanced MDHO exploits all the data signals transmitted by the diversity set members of the MS. The performance evaluation is carried out using a system-level simulation. Simulation results show that the enhanced MDHO is more spectrally efficient than conventional MDHO, fast access station switching (FASS) and hard handover (HHO) techniques.