Analysis and comparison of mobility management strategies in public land mobile networks from a multiobjective perspective

Abstract

Mobility management is one of the basic pillars of any mobile network. Thanks to this management task, mobile networks are able to track the subscribers’ movement along the service area in order to maintain calls and data sessions in progress as well as to deliver incoming calls and start new data sessions with an idle mobile device. To do that, every mobility management strategy is composed by two conflicting procedures, named location update (used to track the subscribers’ movements) and paging (used to redirect the incoming call or data session to the proper network cell). This work presents a multiobjective analysis and comparison of the most common location update strategies jointly with the most common paging procedures. Results of our research show that each mobility management strategy is dominant in a particular region of the objective space, which means that a given mobility management strategy would be or not the best choice for a network operator depending on its specific requirements. In this regard, we show that the location update strategy based on registration areas is more efficient than the one based on reporting cells except in regions of the objective space of high paging cost. Besides, each paging procedure is also dominant in a specific region of the objective space, with the exception of the blanket paging that has shown to be the most inefficient in the whole objective space.