Fast Mobile WiMAX handover by optimizing network topology acquisition phase procedure

Similar to the various cellular and broadband communication technologies, globally mobility based research in WiMAX is mostly focused on location management and handover management. In Mobile WiMAX, the decision for initiating handover by a wireless terminal or Base Station (BS) depends on the Received Signal Strengths (RSS) from the present serving BS (SBS) and the Neighboring BSs (NBS). The existing handover methods in WiMAX suffer from definite drawbacks, typically related to consumption of handover latencies, channel resources and data transmission losses. Advertising, Scanning and Ranging are the different steps involved in WiMAX scanning process and are performed in a sequential manner. Handover procedures are crippled by severe problems such as unnecessary scanning activity in rather non-optimized scanning interval prior to finalizing a TBS and lengthened inter-handover connection gaps. This paper propose to select the appropriate NBSs as the TBS contender, before the scanning process, based on active service flows, bandwidth and QoS necessities of the MS, for avoiding unwanted scanning activities and allocating the ranging slots to TBS alone, prohibiting the other NBSs from needlessly allocating such slots. Our proposed method is simulated using OPNET Modeler simulator and its performance is evaluated.