This paper makes qualitative analysis to the performance of soft handover technology of downlink WCDMA(Wideband code division multiple access) system

which will play an important role in the third generation mobile communication system.Taking handover margin as a criterion

it also gives a comparison between hard handover and soft handover.Moreover

the macro-diversity effect has been studied in detail.At the end of this paper

some equations are derived

in which two important parameters

i.e.

multipath characteristics and the user density in the cell

have close relation to the macro-diversity gain.