Determination of the transmission timing during soft handover in a UMTS communication system by a high-order multicast switching device, in order to avoid redundant communication paths

摘要

A communication system is presented for transmitting packet data from a communication terminal device (10) to a mobile station (50), which is connected to a plurality of base stations (42,43,44). In order to realise soft handover, packet data sent from each of the base stations has to be received by the mobile station at the same time. A multipath point MP high-order switching device (20) is adapted to determine transmission timing at which each of the devices included in the communication paths (C) transmits the packet data. By making the determination of the transmission timing at the MP high-order switching device instead of at an MP low-order switching device (31,32), relaying of packet data and redundant communication paths are avoided.