Why no Soft Handover in LTE ?

December 20, 2016 | By Mohamed Abdel Monem @ Vodafone

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When LTE system was developed one of the big technical feature from UMTS Soft/Softer HO
was missing from the architecture. There are many specific reasons why LTE dropped
altogether soft HO (connect-before-break) from the system design.

Before discussing about why LTE skipped SHO and only implemented HHO, lets check the
basic concept of soft/softer HO.

SHO concept

SHO or connect-before-break HO is a category of HO procedure where radio links are added

or removed in such a fashion that there is always one radio link connected to the UE.

All the radio links connected to the UE at a particular time are part of the AS and the
number can vary from 1 to 8. This means at least one and maximum of 8 radio links are
connected to the UE.

SHO is a part of WCDMA system which is basically same in concept as in CDMA systems.

In the case of SHO , MS is in the overlapping cell coverage area of 2 sectors belonging to
different BTSs.
In DL direction signals received from different base stations are combined at the rake
receiver of the UE.
In the UL the scrambled signals from different BTSs for a particular UE are compared
frame-by-frame basis at the RNC and the best candidate is selected after each interleaving
period; i.e. every 10, 20, 40 or 80ms.

Soft & softer HOs are only possible when UE is in connected state with dedicated channel
(DCH).

Even with HSDSCH (High-Speed DL Shared Channel) there is no SHO in UMTS. In cased
HSDPA communication there is only hard HO which is break before connect. Means UE is
never connected to more than one radio link at a time and when UE goes out of coverage of
a particular cell that radio link is teared down before adding the better radio link.

Requirements for SHO and what is missing in LTE

Lets discuss why LTE does not have SHO as in WCDMA and CDMA systems. Though
there are various reasons, I documented here 3 causes why SHO was omitted from LTE.

Adjacent Cell Frequency Reuse

SHO is possible in CDMA because adjacent cells can operate on the same frequencies as
long as they use different scrambling codes. So, a UE can listen to 2 different cells by
decoding the received signals twice, using a scrambling code from each cell on each for each
decoded signal. This allows a UE to communicate with both cells during HO, making it a
SHO.

LTE is based on OFDMA, which is fundamentally a frequency division method. This means
that a UE has to actually resync to a different set of frequency subcarriers when it hands
over between cells, removing the possibility for SHO. In fact, when a HO is beginning, an
LTE UE has to go into a compressed mode where it listens to its current cell for part of the
time and searches for a new cell the rest of the time. With modern radio technology, this
retuning can happen fast enough to make the inter-frequency retuning much more seamless
than it was in older technologies like GSM, obviating the need for SHO.

Flat Architecture

LTE has flat architecture which means theres no central node controller like the BSC or
RNC. Therefore theres no need to sum up multiple active signals like you would say for in
cdma. Another reason being, theres no need for power control in LTE because of its

orthogonal modulation scheme, theres no self interference (like in cdma) so no worries

about Rx diversity gain and therefore SHO can be dropped.

Orthogonality in LTE
Cell-edge reception (which was at the core of SHO design in WCDMA) issue is not quite
applicable in LTE networks because of orthogonality in both UL and DL. Therefore SHO can
be dropped from the LTE system.

Conclusion

Though LTE does not have soft or softer HO it still maintains seamless mobility using hard
HO. In LTE there are 3 different types of HO can be possible

Intra-LTE HO: In this case source and target cells are part of the same LTE network.

Inter-LTE HO: HO happens towards other LTE nodes. (Inter-MME and Inter-SGW)

Inter-RAT HO: HO between different radio technologies. For example HO from LTE to
WCDMA.