Fast group scanning scheme with dynamic neighbor base station list in IEEE 802.16e networks

For handover in IEEE 802.16e, scanning procedure by mobile station is defined to find the most reliable target base station. However, the conventional scanning schemes cannot guarantee a fast target base station decision because some of the neighbor base stations of the scanning list provided by a serving base station are not actually attachable by the mobile stations. In this paper, we propose a new group-based scanning scheme, in which grouping of mobile stations by signal strength reduces the number of channels to scan so that fast scanning is achieved. To enhance the performance of the group-based scanning scheme, a dynamic neighbor base station list (DNL) management method is proposed. Simulation results show that our proposed scanning scheme is more efficient than the conventional one in terms of scanning time and accuracy of scanning channel list.