2009 IEEE Mobile WiMAX Symposium
On Handover Performance Analysis in Mobile
WiMAX Networks
Yazan A Alqudah, Senior Member, IEEE, Huiqin Yan
Abstract—Mobile WiMAX carries the promise of ubiquitous
broadband wireless access enabling real-time and multimedia
applications. One of the main features for enabling mobility is
Handover. This paper introduces a new methodology using data
latency for characterizing handover performance. The new
methodology also enables the detection of issues during handover
by projecting data latency pattern.
Index Terms — WiMAX, Handover, Latency
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE mobile WiMAX defined in 802.16e standards
addresses wireless broadband access for mobile users.
Key features added to fixed WiMAX standards include
support for Mobile Subscriber Station (MS) mobility through
Handover [1-6].
Handover support is a key feature that enables mobility in
WiMAX. Users and devices can roam across coverage area
while maintaining not only their data connectivity but also
active traffic. The standards define two types of handover:
hard handover and soft handover. Hard handover implements
break-before-make, i.e., the Mobile Station (MS) breaks its
radio link with the serving Base Station (BS) before
establishing radio link with the new target BS. In contrast,
soft handover is a make-before-break. The MS establishes a
radio link with the target BS before stopping its radio link with
the serving BS. Two methods of soft handover are defined:
Fast BS Switching (FBSS) and Macro Diversity Handover
(MDHO). In FBSS, service flows are set up with multiple
BSs, only air link needs to be established for handover. In
MDHO, service flows are established with a new anchor BS
before they are terminated with the previous anchor BS.
MDHO requires that two or more BSs transmit the same
service flows in the downlink (DL) and receive identical
service flows from the MS in the uplink (UL). Hard handover
is mandatory while soft handover is optional. In this paper, all
discussions and performance analysis are based on hard
handover.
Several studies have considered link performance for
WiMAX and other networks with objective of determining
impact of handover on traffic performance [7-11]. This paper
is concerned with introducing a new methodology for studying
handover performance and characterizing its behavior.
978-0-7695-3719-1/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/MWS.2009.44
II. HANDOVER OVERVIEW
Handover is defined as the process in which an MS
migrates from the air interface provided by one BS to an air
interface provided by another BS.
The preparation for handover starts with the exchange of
capability information during the registration process that
pertains to whether the device can support handover, as well
as other information related to handover configuration. The
MS learns about neighboring BSs through the BS broadcasted
management message: MOB_NBR_ADV. This message
contains neighbor information required to scan and potentially
handover to one of the neighbors, such as neighbor’s center
frequency, bandwidth, preamble id, etc. The MS also gets
handover related triggers through MOB_NBR-ADV message
or another broadcast management message (DCD).
Upon changes of radio link signal quality with serving BS
(e.g. RSSI or CINR change exceeds a preset value) that meets
scan triggers, the MS initiates a neighbor scan. The MS
negotiates with the serving BS scanning windows where it
stops listening to the serving BS and then sync to and measure
the neighbor BS signal quality. The MS and BS also negotiate
the scan iteration, i.e., the number of scanning windows. This
exchange utilizes MOB_SCN-REQ and MOB_SCN-RSP
management messages. The scanning process results in traffic
interruption, or delay on the downlink and uplink since the MS
is consumed by scanning and measuring neighbor BS signal
quality. The down time is controlled by the ability of the MS
to sync to different neighbors and the total number of
neighbors, essentially the scan duration and the scan iteration.
This can be expressed as
Tscan = NTs = αM
where N is total number of scan windows, Ts is the number of
frames in each scan window, M is the total number of
neighbors to be scanned and α is a coefficient related to the
ability of the MS to sync to its neighbors.
Handover can be initiated either by the MS or the serving
BS. In case of MS initiated handover, the decision to start
handover is based on trigger conditions that are defined in the
DCD message sent by the BS. Upon meeting one or more of
these conditions, the MS starts the handover procedure by
sending MOB_MSHO-REQ to the serving BS. The serving
BS verifies that resources are available at the target BS
through backbone and prepares handover with the target BS.
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The serving BS confirms sufficient resources to meet Quality
of Service (QOS) parameters defined for the connections. The
Serving BS sends MOB_BSHO-RSP to the MS. In case of BS
initiated handover, the serving BS asks the MS to send scan
report. Based on the scan report and other conditions such as
traffic loading, the serving BS may direct the MS to handover
to another BS by sending MOB_BSHO-REQ.
Upon reception of either MOB_BSHO-RSP or
MOB_BSHO-REQ, the MS notifies the BS with its intent to
start HO by sending MOB_HO-IND. Once the BS receives
MOB_HO_IND, or it believes the MS has left, it will stop
making DL allocation to the MS and stop polling the MS.
The MS syncs to the target BS and the latter provides UL
allocation to the MS to send RNG-REQ. Upon successful
reception of RNG-REQ, the target BS sends RNG-RSP to the
MS. Handover network re-entry is completed when MS
receives and processes the RNG-RSP message. (Note: other
optimized or non-optimized handover network re-entry are out
of scope and are not discussed in this paper.)
III. HANDOVER PERFORMANCE
Several performance metrics can be utilized to characterize
link performance in a wireless environment. These can be
applied at the physical layer by measuring BER or application
layer through measurement of throughput, frame processing
rate and data latency.
Due to the large number of MAC layer management
messages exchanged between the MS and BS and link
interruptions (during scanning, ranging and network reentry),
the most accepted performance metric to measure handover is
data latency.
Data latency measures the total delay required for data
packets transmitted by the BS to be received by the MS. These
measurements highlight normal operation of the system as
well as delays experienced by the packet due to unavailability
of the MS.
To fully characterize the system performance we propose an
experiment setup where all frames are occupied by data
packets in the uplink and downlink. The packet data size (P
bytes) is selected such that one packet is transmitted in a
single frame on DL and UL. This eliminates the impact of
fragmentation and any scheduling interference both at MS and
BS. Since 200 frames are transmitted per second, the data rate
is equal to 200 × P × 8 × 10 −6 mbps. The packet protocol is
UDP.
The setup is illustrated in Figure 1, where a traffic generator
that contains two interfaces (A & B) is used to exchange
packets between these interfaces. The packets traveling from
A to B produce the UL traffic, i.e., traffic transmitted by MS
to BS. Similarly, packets transmitted from B to A generate the
DL traffic, i.e., traffic from BS to MS. At interface B, we have
two BSs. They are neighbors of each other. Link quality to
these two BSs is controlled by two attenuators so that MS may
handover between them.
For each packet generated, the transmitted time as well as
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the arrival time is recorded and the difference is used to
calculate data latency.
Under normal operations the latency includes the latency of
the network including switches and routers as well as the
latency of the link between MS and BS. Since we are
interested in the latency of the WiMAX link and the minimal
possible latency is a WiMAX frame, we will measure all
latency results in units of WiMAX frame, i.e., dividing latency
with frame length (5ms) and rounding the result.
Figure 1: Experiment Setup
A. Scanning Performance
To understand the latency performance during scan, the link
quality to the serving BS is set such that the scan trigger is
met. To prevent handover, the link to neighboring BSs is made
worse than the link to the current serving BS. Thus, the
serving BS is the preferred station based on the handover
metrics. So after one scan request, scan negotiation with BS
and scan operation, the MS will stay with the original serving
BS. Since the scan trigger is still met, the MS will start
another scan request with the serving BS. To prevent this from
happening immediately, a scan holdoff timer is set. Only when
this timer expires, shall the MS start a new scan request.
Figure 2 shows the data latency during the scan process.
Graphs (a) and (b) in Figure 2 show the scanning frames as
well as the traffic interruption during scan for DL and UL
respectively. Here four scan requests and operations are shown
in the graphs. The scan holdoff period is 2000 frames, i.e., 10
second. Graph (c) in Figure 2 is a zoomed graph for the first
scan operation of Graph (a) and (b). In this example, the
scanning window, i.e., the scan duration is equal to 5 frames
and there are 4 scan iterations in the scan operation. Graph (c)
shows that 6 packets on the DL were transmitted after the link
resumes. This is because BS dumps all the packets buffered
during scan at the first frame when the link resumes. It also
shows that 11 packets have extra delay on UL compared to
other packets. This is caused by MS being granted BW for UL
transmission every 4 frames in this case. After the scan, the
MS transmits packets held in the queue that contains 11
packets. These 11 packets are transmitted in 2 frames, the first
contains 4 packets and the second contains 7 packets.

(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure 2: Data latency during scan (a) DL, (b) UL, (c) DL and UL
zoom
B. Handover Performance
The handover is triggered by controlling link quality to the
serving BS and neighbor BSs. The attenuation on the link with
serving BS is increased to allow MS to scan neighbors,
simultaneously, neighboring attenuation is reduced to ensure
MS find a neighbor that meets handover trigger. Figure 3
shows the CINR changes of BS1 and BS2.
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22
20
18
16
CINR
14
12
10
8
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Time
Y BS1 BS 2
Figure 3: CINR changes for BS1 and BS2
With the CINR changes of BS1 and BS2, the MS handovers
between BS1 and BS2. Graph (a) of Figure 4 shows DL and
UL data latency during three such handover procedures.
Graphs (b) and (c) in Figure 4 show DL and UL data latency,
respectively, during one handover procedure in order to give a
close look at the traffic interruption during handover. The first
four traffic interruptions are due to scanning, which is
analyzed in the previous subsection. The last interruption is
due to the actual handover, i.e., the MS leaves the serving BS
and syncs to the target BS. This procedure starts after the MS
sends HO-IND to the serving BS and finishes after the MS
receives RNG-RSP from the target BS, and refreshes the
connection and security related information. The handover
procedure takes 16 frames in this example. Graph (b) shows
that 17 packets on the DL were transmitted after handover is
completed. This is because BS dumps all the packets buffered
during handover at the first frame when the MS completes
handover to the target BS. On the UL side, Graph (c) shows
that after the MS completes handover to the target BS, the MS
receives two chunks of bandwidth, and it sends as many
packets as possible in the first allocation of bandwidth, then all
the remaining buffered packets are sent in the second
allocation of bandwidth. Due to the BS scheduling, BS cannot
allocate enough bandwidth for the MS to send all the packets
buffered during handover at one time. For both DL and UL, it
is shown that the largest data latency is around 20 frames, i.e.,
100 ms, which in some applications might not be noticeable to
end user.
 methodology populates every frame with data to capture link
behavior based on the latency experienced by data. DL and
UL data latency during scan and handover are captured and
analyzed. In a flawless wireless system, the data latency
caused by handover should be within expected limits and
unnoticeable to end user.
The advantage of the new method to measure handover
performance is apparent. Not only does it provide a measure
of the data latency during handover, it also provides insight
into the system performance and behavior.

(a)

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Figure 4: Data latency during handover (a) DL and UL, (b) DL “Effects of Handover on TCP Congestion Control Algorithms over
zoom, (c) UL zoom Mobile WiMAX” 5th IEEE CCNC 2008. 5th IEEE, 10-12 Jan. 2008
Page(s):1230 - 1231
IV. Conclusion

In this paper, a new methodology using data latency is

introduced to characterize handover performance. The new

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