Patent ID: 8169967

Claim:
A method for performing a handover of a mobile station (MS) in a broadband mobile communication system, the method comprising: (a) receiving information about respective neighbor base stations and reception strengths for the respective neighbor base stations from a Serving Radio Access System (RAS) currently communicating with the MS; (b) extracting a value of at least one specific field from the received information about the neighbor base stations, said information including a base station utilization level; (c) combining the extracted value regarding base station utilization level of the neighbor base stations with respective reception strengths of the neighbor base station to obtain respective combined values, the method of combining favoring higher reception strength and lower utilization level, wherein the utilization level provides a greater contribution to the combined value than the reception strength; and (d) selecting a maximum value from among the combined values in step (c); (e) selecting a base station corresponding to the selected maximum value from the neighbor base stations; and (f) transmitting a handover request message to the selected base station.