Abstract
A new finger replacement technique which is applicable for RAKE receivers in the soft hand-over region has been proposed and studied under the ideal assumption that the fading is both independent and identically distributed from path to path. To supplement our previous work, we present a general comprehensive framework for the performance assessment of the proposed finger replacement schemes operating over independent but non-identically distributed (i.n.d.) faded paths. To accomplish this object, we derive new closed-form expressions for the target key statistics which are composed of i.n.d. exponential random variables. With these new expressions, the performance analysis of various wireless communication systems over more practical channel environments can be possible.