On Dynamically Adapting Registration Areas to User Mobility Patterns in PCS Networks

Location management is an essential service in mobile networks. It provides mechanisms for recording and querying location of mobile units in the network. This is needed for establishing calls to mobile units. In PCS networks, location management protocols such as IS-41 and GSM use statically defined Registration Areas (RAs) with two-level hierarchy of location databases. In this paper, we propose an extension to PCS location management protocol by introducing the concept of dynamically overlapping registration areas. We show through simulation that by dynamically adapting the registration areas to aggregate mobility pattern of the mobile units, we can greatly reduce the number of location updates by mobiles. Further, the cost of adapting the registration areas is shown to be low in terms of memory and communication requirements.