Investigation of soft-handover near street crossings in UMTS live Networks

In this paper we measured the soft-handover (SHO) probability at and near street crossings in UMTS. Literature quotes two main propagation paths in urban macro-cell scenarios: along street-canyons and over the rooftops. Due to the fact that propagation along street canyons is one of the main propagation paths we expected high SHO probability at street crossings. To evaluate this effect we measured the active-set-size along a route in the city center of Vienna in three different UMTS networks of three different operators. We analyzed the probability of being in SHO-state and the probability of various active-set-sizes for different distances from street crossings.The results show that probability of being in SHO does not depend on street crossings.