Patent ID: 8634354

Claim:
An access terminal, comprising: a transceiver configured to communicate with one or more multi-carrier radio networks; one or more memories storing code and a preferred roaming list, the preferred roaming list comprising a plurality of geographic area (GEO) tables, each GEO table of the plurality of GEO tables comprising a plurality of acquisition tables, each acquisition table of the plurality of acquisition tables comprising a plurality of channels; and a controller coupled to the transceiver and to the one or more memories, the controller is configured to: (a) select a first acquisition channel from a first acquisition table stored in the memory, (b) acquire the first acquisition channel, (c) receive one or more overhead messages on the first acquisition channel, the one or more overhead messages comprising identifiers of channels available to the access terminal, (d) generate a session seed, (e) execute a hashing function using the identifiers and the session seed to obtain a selected channel from among the channels available, (f) acquire the selected channel, (g) perform an attempt to establish a session through the selected channel, and (h) if the attempt to establish a session fails, select a second acquisition channel from a second acquisition table stored in the memory, the second acquisition table being different from the first acquisition table, and repeat the steps (a) through (g); wherein the controller is configured to select the second acquisition channel and repeat the steps (a) through (g) after a single failure to establish session.