METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MANAGING MOBILITY TRANSACTIONS AMONG FIXED/NOMADIC WIRELESS TERMINALS

A method is provided for managing the mobility attempts for a Fixed/Nomadic wireless terminal so as to substantially limit those attempts to only requests for handoff to base stations within a restricted set to which handoff of the wireless terminal is permitted. In a particular embodiment, the method of the invention operates to prune the allowed base-station scan list, for a particular Fixed/Nomadic wireless terminal, when the particular wireless terminal requests a grant of scan durations from the serving base station. Since differentiation/restriction is applied at the scanning stage itself, the mobility attempts by the Fixed/Nomadic wireless terminal is limited and much more controlled, thus reducing spurious handoff attempts that need to be rejected by the serving base station or the serving gateway.