Secondary station and method of operating the station

摘要

A secondary station has a receiver capable of resolving signals received (504,510) as a plurality of multipath signals from a plurality of base stations during a soft handover process. In order to decode and act upon the received signals in a very short period of time, an initial subset of received multipath signals is processed (506) to provide an estimate of the action needing to be taken by the station, which action is then implemented by the station (508). Later arriving signals are processed separately (512) and used to update the estimate, as a result of which the action already taken may be corrected (514). Such a secondary station is particularly suitable for decoding and acting upon power control commands included in received signals in a UMTS system, for which a very limited period of time is provided by the UMTS specification.