After struggled for a while, I figured out something trivial but hard to see. Hopefully this answer will help others who has experienced the same problem.
When I started to use emacs version 24.3 I didn't know the Cedet version 2.0 was already a built-in package at that time. I downloaded Cedet 1.1 version from
Cedet SourceForge website.
And configured that according to some tutorial online by loading my downloaded 1.1 cedet.el file.
Surprisingly this Cedet 1.1 package is still compatible with emacs 24.3 version. Unfortunately this is not the case for emacs 24.5 version, the semantic mode encountered some problem with c mode. Therefore the best solution is to switch back to the built-in Cedet 2.0 version.
If you have used the older version of Cedet, it's possible that the old saved .semanticdb files are not compatible with latest Cedet semanticdb. You can do
rm -rf ~/.semanticdb/
So the new version semanticdb can create and use the new version of semanticdb (my friend helped me with that subtle problem so I can get the built-in Cedet 2.0 up and running).