Wireless subscriber mobility management using adaptive individual location areas for PCS systems

We consider a new mobility management scheme-the adaptive location area tracking scheme-in which each mobile performs a location registration as it crosses the boundary of its current personal location area and is assigned a new location area. The size and shape of the new location area depend on the mobile's mobility and call characteristics in its previous location area. The objective is to minimize the combined average signaling cost of both paging and registration activities for each individual mobile user. We model the mobility and incoming call traffic of an individual mobile user using Brownian motion with the drift process and Poisson arrival process. Under the assumption of a one-dimensional cellular network environment, we investigate the effects of user mobility parameters such as average movement speed, location uncertainty and mean call arrival rate on the size and shape of individual location areas. This study reveals that, besides size, the shape of the location areas also plays an important role in signaling cost reduction. Performance analysis shows that this scheme offers a cost reduction up to 50% as compared to a previously proposed scheme.