Abstract. We study the performance of a fixed-beam system in the forward link of IS-95 CDMA systems by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The simulations are performed using a comprehensive model of the forward link which includes correlated shadowing, soft and softer handoff. and transmit power allocation. The effects of user distribution, softlsofter handoff threshold, and multipath diversity are examined. We find that the availability of signal diversity plays an important role in the system performance. When the soft handoff threshold is decreased from -12 dB to -18 dB. capacity increases by 15%. but handoff overhead more than doubles. When fifty percent of users have 2-ray multipath. capacity increases by 18%. Thus, the availability of multipath in the system has a dramatic influence on forward link capacity. A non-uniform distribution using a "highways" model reduces capacity by more than a half. This shows that for successful implementation of a fixed-beam system, it is important to plan cell sites in a way that keeps loading uniformly distributed in azimuth.

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