Multipath propagation of radio signal introduces frequency selectivity. OFDMA systems greatly suffer from frequency selective fading. It is an important limit factor of performance of OFDMA systems, especially in subband based multiple user access scehems. In this paper, we propose the method of subband selection and handover to improve the system performance over the frequency selective channel. Two subband selection algorithms are presented to accurately select the subband with high channel gain and avoid the channel notch. The random access procedure employing subband selection is presented as an example. The effects of the subband selection are also given. The selection effectively improves the performances of frame synchronization, frequency synchronization, channel estimation, and bit error rate (BER). The investigations show that the proposed scheme is promising to reliable communications over frequency selective fading channel.