Abstract
In CDMA cellular systems, the frequency reuse factor equals one. Therefore, the soft-handoff technology with combining macroscopic diversity was introduced to enhance the link performance. In this work, a novel macroscopic diversity combining scheme is proposed to enhance the link performance of the forward-link. The basic concept of this scheme is to integrate error correction coding into the soft-handoff technology. According to the number of soft-handoff channels, the source information is encoded by a convolutional code with a lower code rate. The coded symbols are then equally distributed to all channels from different BSs to the MS, and each channel carries a disjointed set of coded symbols. For this proposed scheme, no extra transmission power or bandwidth is required. The only cost is a slight increase of the encoding and decoding complexity of the convolutional codes. Numerical and simulation results show that a performance gain of 1 dB in bit energy-to-total noise power density ratio can be obtained as compared with the conventional scheme in the same conditions. Copyright © 2007 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.