Patent 8249024 was granted and assigned to Apple (company) on August, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Soft handoff in an OFDMA system is disclosed. If the pilot signal strength for a base station exceeds the defined threshold, the base station is added to an active set list. Subcarriers in a plurality of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols are divided and allocated into subchannels. The OFDM symbols are divided and multiplexed. A soft handoff zone with a first dimension of the subchannels and a second dimension of the divided and multiplexed OFDM symbols is defined. The soft handoff zone has subcarriers with a subchannel definition, for example, an identical permutation.