Systems and methods for performing handover cancellation in a wireless communication system are provided. According to an aspect of the invention, a mobile station requests bandwidth from a serving base station for the mobile station to send a handover cancellation request message to the serving base station. The mobile station then receives an allocation of the requested bandwidth from the serving base station, and sends the handover cancellation request message to the serving base station via the allocated bandwidth. The mobile station requests the bandwidth after a disconnect time and before a resource retain time.