A Low-Latency Scanning with Association Mechanism for Real-Time Communication in Mobile WiMAX

In Mobile WiMAX, a mobile station (MS) scans neighboring base stations (BSs) before conducting handover. The MS may perform the association further, i.e., initial ranging, with neighboring BSs during scanning to obtain ranging parameters and/or service availability information for a potential handover to a BS and/or the selection of target BSs. However, the scanning with association scheme may introduce additional latency for handover. This study first evaluates the conventional scanning with association process, and then proposes a mechanism to reduce the association latency. The performance models of the proposed mechanism are presented and the accuracies of analytical models are verified by simulations. Results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism reduces the association latency by 61.9%-78.0% for audio services and 41.3%-65.4% for video services.