Patent ID: 7668549

Claim:
A method for handling at least one soft handoff (SHO) request from at least one mobile station in a wireless communication system, the method comprising: receiving a incoming SHO request at a base station sent from the at least one mobile station at a base station; determining a set of parameters of the received SHO request; prioritizing the received SHO request with an in-progress SHO being performed by the base station based on the set of parameters corresponding to each SHO request; processing the prioritized SHO request corresponding to each mobile station based on the set of parameters corresponding to each SHO request, and wherein the prioritizing step comprises: examining if an in-progress SHO request is being present, wherein an in-progress SHO request is a SHO request that is being processed; evaluating the in-progress SHO request with a new SHO request based on a predefined criterion; preempting the in-progress SHO request, if the predefined criterion evaluates to true; and executing the new SHO request in response to preempting the in-progress SHO request.