A Dynamic Individualized Location Management Algorithm

The challenge of supporting rapidly growing numbers of mobile subscribers, while constrained by limited radio spectrum, is being met through increasingly smaller radio cells. This, however, results in increased signalling for location management procedures, which reduces the bandwidth available for user traffic. Location areas in current systems, such as GSM, consist of static and arbitrarily-defined collections of cells, which do not take into account individual subscriber mobility patterns, either in space or time. A location management algorithm is proposed which uses the mobility history of individual subscribers to dynamically create individualized location areas, based on previous movements from cell to cell. The average duration spent in each visited cell is also maintained and is used to define paging which are most likely to contain the subscriber. An activity-based mobility model was developed to test the proposed algorithm. Overall, the dynamic algorithm incurred significantly lower location management costs, in terms of signalling messages generated, for all parameters examined.