Patent ID: 6999434

Claim:
A system for providing a soft handoff of a mobile from a serving base station to a target base station in an Internet Protocol based code division multiple access network, wherein said base stations are autonomous and without a centralized network entity that distributes user traffic to both the serving base station and the target base station, said system comprising means at said serving base station for combining upper layer packets with data at the link-layer to produce lower layer link-layer packets, for adding a label to said lower layer link-layer data packets to produce a remote layered link-layer data packet, and for adding a header to said remote layered link-layer data packet to produce an encapsulated Internet Protocol packet including a copy of said lower layer link-layer data packet unit; means at said serving base station for transmitting a data packet unit including said lower layer link-layer data packets from said serving base station to said mobile; means at said serving base station for transmitting said encapsulated remote layered data packet including said remote layered link-layer data packets to said target base station; means at said target base station for relaying said encapsulated remote layered data packet to said mobile without repeating the processing done at said serving base station for constructing said lower layer link-layer data packets; and means at said mobile for combining the lower layer link-layered packets of said copy of said data packet unit from said target base station with the lower layer link-layer packets of said data packet from said serving base station to effectuate the soft handoff.