Link capacities between GSM and CDMA

Abstract

This paper compares the link capacity between GSM and CDMA. Viterbi's paper (see IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, October 1994) analyzed the CDMA link capacity and found that it can be extended due to the soft handoff operation. When calculating the link budget of CDMA, there is about a 4 dB advantage realistically by utilizing a selective diversity between two neighboring cells in the soft handoff region. A new idea has come from GSM operators that uses a ping-pong handoff arrangement in one handoff region which can achieve the same selective diversity between two neighboring cells. This paper analyzes the performance of this arrangement.