Substantial Reduction of Handover Delay for Optimum Mobility in WIMAX

WIMAX is one of the fastest emerging technologies which is considered as cheaper alternative to mobile technology protocols such as 3G, 4G or 5G. WiMAX promises high speed data transfer over longer distances and can achieve comparable good quality of service to other mobile protocols .To achieve the goal of providing long distance services with high bandwidth data transfer, WIMAX has to develop the support for high mobility without degradation of the quality of service..To achieve mobility the basic requirement is to support efficient Handover which guarantees continuous and uninterrupted data transfer.This paper discusses the handover process in Mobile WIMAX and tries to find the factors that are involved in handover process which can play a role in improving the mobility in Mobile WIMAX. The standard targeted handover delay is 50 ms over vehicular speed of 72 kmph which has been used as the optimal simulation speed. The OPNET simulation has taken into account testing the following parameters that are linked to the handover success: Link going down factor, Scan iteration, Interleaving Interval and Timeout Parameter. The simulation results show that there has been certain improvement in handover delay such average delay per second and the throughput is better due to the high received signal strength.