Patent ID: 7505776

Claim:
A method of verifying availability of a mobile subscriber station (MSS) that is in an idle mode, the method comprising: receiving a request message from the MSS, the request message requesting to enter idle mode; transmitting a response message to the MSS, the response message including paging information that further includes information related to at least one of paging group identification, paging cycle, and paging offset; transmitting a paging message to the MSS, the paging message including an action code that instructs the MSS to perform one of a ranging operation and network entry; retransmitting the paging message to the MSS if a ranging request message is not received from the MSS until a next paging listening interval, wherein a predefined paging retry counter is decremented by one every time the paging message is retransmitted; determining that the MSS is unavailable if the predefined paging retry counter reaches zero; and transmitting a backbone message over a backbone network to all base stations (BS) in a same paging group to remove the unavailable MSS from each list of MSSs in idle mode.