Abstract: Carrier pre-assignment is applied in multi-carrier handover operation to mitigate the impact to the user experience during handover and to achieve various objectives of call admission control in wireless multi-carrier OFDM networks. With carrier pre-assignment, a mobile station communicates its multi-carrier information to a target base station. The target base station pre-assigns secondary carriers to fulfill the requirements of the mobile station. In a first embodiment, a break-before-entry (BBE) multi-carrier handover procedure with carrier pre-assignment is provided. In a second embodiment, an entry-before-break (EBB) multi-carrier handover procedures for both inter-FA and intra-FA with carrier pre-assignment are provided. The multi-carrier handover procedures with carrier pre-assignment may be applied to 2-to-2 or N-to-N carriers handover situation.

Abstract: In a carrier assignment procedure, a mobile station and its serving base station exchange and negotiate carrier deployment and multi-carrier capability information, and make a well-informed carrier assignment decision based on the negotiation result. The carrier assignment procedure ensures that the assigned secondary carriers are not only supported by both the serving BS and the MS, but are also desirable under additional requirements and considerations. Furthermore, the carrier assignment decision may be updated based on additional considerations such as channel quality measurement and network load condition over the assigned carriers. Such updated assignment decision may be made by the base station in unsolicited manner, or based on a carrier re-assignment request from the mobile station.