Performance comparison of location areas and reporting centres under individualised mobility models

Location management deals with how to track mobile users within the cellular network. It consists of two basic operations: location update and paging. The total cost of location management is the sum of the location update cost and the paging cost. There are many location management schemes, Location Areas and Reporting Centers are two classical and popular location management schemes. To the best of our knowledge, no performance comparison between Reporting Centers and Location Areas has been reported in the literature. The paper compares the performance of the Location Areas scheme and the Reporting Centers scheme. The motivation for the study is that the location areas can be derived from a given set of reporting centers such that the location update cost difference between the Reporting Centers scheme and the Location Areas scheme is small whereas the paging cost in the Reporting Centers scheme is larger than that in the Location Areas scheme. Given a set of reporting centers, this paper shows how to derive the location areas from the reporting centers, and compares the performance of Location Areas and Reporting Centers schemes under various mobility models and incoming call arrival rates. Simulation results show that the Location Areas scheme greatly outperforms the Reporting Centers scheme in most cases although the Reporting Centers scheme performs a little bit better than the Location Areas scheme in some extreme cases.