Patent ID: 7653393

Claim:
A method for broadcasting information of neighbor base stations by a base station in a communication system, the method comprising the steps of: setting a value of each of a plurality of fields included in each of m fragments of the information of neighbor base stations; and broadcasting each of the m fragments of the information of neighbor base stations at a predetermined time for each fragment, wherein the communication system is a Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) communication system which uses an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) scheme using a plurality of sub-carriers, and supports a multi-cell structure and a mobility of a mobile station so that the mobile station obtains the information of neighbor base stations by receiving the information of neighbor base stations from a serving base station, and the mobile station may perform a handoff process on moving to another cell after preliminarily obtaining the information of neighbor base stations, wherein the m fragments are generated by fragmenting a broadcast message including the information of neighbor base stations into m fragments, and wherein the plurality of fields include in each of the m fragments a first field, a second field, and a third field, the first field indicates a fragmentation index for a current fragment, the second field indicates a total number of fragments equal to m, where m is an integer greater than or equal to 1, and the third field indicates a number of neighbor base stations included in the current fragment, wherein the current fragment includes identifiers of the neighbor base stations included in the current fragment, wherein the current fragment includes information of physical frequencies for the neighbor base stations included in the current fragment, wherein the plurality of fields include an operator ID field and a configuration change count field which is incremented each time information for an associated neighbor base station has changed, and wherein the plurality of fields include a Downlink Channel Descriptor (DCD) Configuration Change Count field representing a DCD change count for the neighbor base stations included in the current fragment, and a Uplink Channel Descriptor (UCD) Configuration Change Count field representing a UCD change count for the neighbor base stations included in the current fragment.