Patent ID: 7162242

Claim:
A method comprising the steps, performed by a wireless device for accessing a wireless network through network base stations, of (a) selecting a reverse link cost metric from a list of reverse link cost metrics; (b) determining a reverse link cost according to the selected reverse link cost metric; (c) selecting a candidate base station from a plurality of the base stations (d) sending a probe signal at the reverse link cost to the candidate base station; (e) waiting for a response from the candidate base station within a timeout period; and (f) repeating steps (c) to (e) until either the plurality of base stations has been sent a probe at lest once at substantially the same reverse link cost and corresponding timeout periods have all expired, or a response is received from at least one candidate base station wherein the responding candidate base station is used to provide system access to the wireless network, further comprising the steps of: (g) selecting a forward link quality metric from a list of forward link quality metrics: and (h) biasing the selection of the candidate base station at step (c) toward base stations having a high forward link relative to the plurality of base stations according to the selected forward link quality metric; (i) partitioning the plurality of base stations into a plurality of candidate base stations and a plurality of excluded base stations, wherein each of the plurality of candidate base stations has a candidate forward link quality which exceeds a threshold; and (j) substituting the plurality of base stations with the candidate base stations thereby reducing the cardinality of the plurality of base stations by the cardinality of the plurality of the excluded base stations; wherein the step (h) of biasing the selection of the candidate base station comprises the steps of: (k) ranking the plurality of base stations according to forward link quality; and (l) in step (b) selecting highest ranked base station which has not yet been probed at the reverse link cost.