In order to exploit the benefits of soft handoff, finding good values of handoff control parameters is important. In cellular system specifications such as IS-95C and WCDMA, handoff decision algorithm includes signal strength averaging and drop timer in addition to hysteresis. This paper analyzes the effects of signal strength averaging and drop timer and their performance tradeoffs. Because averaging and drop timer are both based on time delay, one may expect that they have similar impact on soft handoff performance. The results show that the effects of averaging and drop timer are rather similar and closely connected in terms of reducing the signaling overhead. However, they have different impacts on resource usage and diversity gain of the system.