The present invention proposes an infrastructure to enable seamless mobility for wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs) and to provide for management of spectrum and network resources. An WMAN reference model is introduced where the radio resource management (RRM) and handover (HO) sub-layer is introduced into the protocol stack. The WMAN management plane is responsible for the RRM and HO management. Several physical and logical network architecture options for WMAN management are proposed.