Abstract
In DS-CDMA cellular systems, using the same frequency channel at the adjacent cells simultaneously makes soft handoff possible. In soft handoff, mobiles use multiple radio resources for the space diversity of signal in the overlapped region. The previous traffic models of hard handoff are not applicable to the system with soft handoff due to switching radio channels in that region. The handoff rate can be calculated by the mobility of mobiles, which is a function of the size and shape of a cell, and the speed and density of the mobiles. In this paper, we propose an analytical traffic model to study the soft handoff rate. We assume that the system uses a two-way handoff scheme for practical purposes, which connects only two cells to a mobile during soft handoff. We performed a computer simulation to confirm the accuracy of the proposed soft handoff model. The simulation results show good agreement with the analytical model.