METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR COMBINING OF HRPD F-MAC CHANNEL IN SOFT/SOFTER HANDOFF REGION IN A MOBILE COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

摘要

A combination method of HRPD(High-Rate Packet Data) downlink MAC(Medium Access Control) channels in a softer handoff area and a device thereof are provided to enable a rake receiver to use I/Q exchanges, thereby forming an efficient hardware structure when soft-combining output between fingers allocated with different MAC indexes from different sectors in the softer handoff area. A receiver receives data signals to process the signals(405). A searcher detects multi-path signals(410), so that fingers are allocated by delivering multi-path detection information to a microprocessor(415). The fingers demodulate signals of each of the detected paths(420). The demodulated signals are transmitted to I/Q exchanges to determine whether to exchange the signals in reference to MAC indexes assigned to each finger(425). Output of each I/Q exchange is delivered to symbol combiners of each cell to combine symbols by cell(430). The combined symbols are divided into channel signals in a sub-channel demultiplexer(435). The divided signals are inputted to symbol determiners of each sub-channel to determine symbols for each cell, and the determined symbols are logically combined together to determine a symbol of a final downlink MAC channel(440).