Using time-of-day and location-based mobility profiles to improve scanning during handovers

In WiMAX/IEEE 802.16 with mobility support, scanning for an available channel by a mobile station, especially during a handover, must be done promptly in order to reduce delays in network access. We have shown previously that mobile stations can reduce scanning times by maintaining a most probable list of frequencies in use. In this paper, we extend this idea to further capture the mobility patterns of users. By using time-of-day and location-based mobility profiles a mobile station improves scanning performance during handovers. We show this improvement by modeling and simulating an area of WiMAX coverage with various mobility patterns and real-world mobility traces.