A technique to reduce the service disruption time of a mobile station (MS) when the MS performs a hard handover (HHO) is provided. An MS receives MAC context information that is necessary to connect to the target base station (BS) through the serving BS during the HHO preparation time instead of HHO execution time. The HHO preparation phase refers to the stage where a handover is initiated but the MS is still connected with the current serving BS. On the other hand, once the HHO execution begins, the MS must disconnect from the serving BS in order to establish the communication with the target BS.