Method of adjusting a timing of transmissions in a radio communication system

摘要

A secondary station has a receiver capable of resolving signals received as a plurality of multipath signals from a plurality of primary stations during a soft handover process. To decode and act upon the received signals in a very short period of time, the duration of an offset between a downlink timing reference and an uplink timing reference may be varied by the secondary station. By choosing a suitable value for the offset, the secondary station can reduce the changes to the uplink timing reference. The downlink timing reference and/or the offset may be determined from the timings of received downlink signals. The secondary station may request a primary station to adjust the timing of its downlink transmissions to increase the amount of time available for processing the signals by, for example, arranging for downlink signals from the primary station supplying the strongest signal to be received first.