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This paper examines the effect of soft handoff on the uplink user capacity of a code division multiple access system consisting of a single macrocell in which a single hotspot microcell is embedded. The users of these two base stations operate over the same frequency band. In the soft-handoff scenario studied here, both macrocell and microcell base stations serve each system user, and the two received copies of a desired user's signal are summed using maximal ratio combining. Exact and approximate analytical methods are developed to compute uplink user capacity. Simulation results demonstrate a 20% increase in user capacity compared to hard handoff. In addition, simple approximate methods are presented for estimating soft-handoff capacity and are shown to be quite accurate.
Kishore et al. (Fri,) studied this question.