  A new finger replacement technique which is applicable for RAKE receivers in
the soft handover (SHO) region has been proposed and studied in [1], [2] under
the ideal assumption that the fading is both independent and identically
distributed from path to path. To supplement our previous work, we present a
general comprehensive framework for the performance assessment of the proposed
finger replacement schemes operating over independent and non-identically
distributed (i.n.d.) faded paths. To accomplish this object, we derive new
closed-form expressions for the target key statistics which are composed of
i.n.d. exponential random variables. With these new expressions, the
performance analysis of various wireless communication systems over more
practical environments can be possible.
