Reducing Handoff Latency for WiMAX Networks Using Mobility Patterns

In recent years, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) has become an important technology providing wireless connections for mobile terminals in a wireless Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), due to its large radio range. In a MAN environment, wireless clients always have high mobility; therefore, it is possible that the mobile clients will move away from the service coverage of serving base stations and change their associating base stations. The process of switching between different base stations is known as the handoff process. During the handoff process, the connection between the mobile terminal and the serving base station ceases. The quality of mobile wireless networks is significantly affected by handoff latency and packet loss ratio. In this paper, we propose a fast handoff scheme using mobility patterns for WiMAX networks. Mobility patterns are adopted to predict the next base station and therefore waive unnecessary scans, and the serving base station forwards the data packets received during the handoff process to the target base station for the minimizing of the packet loss ratio. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The results demonstrate that our scheme can shorten the handoff latency.