Dynamic Tracking Area List configuration and performance evaluation in LTE

Abstract

Reducing the signaling overhead for tracing user equipment (UE), while maintaining the improved performance over time despite the changes in UE location and mobility patterns, is a challenging issue in the area of mobility management. Flexibility and automatic reconfiguration are two significant features in Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The Tracking Area List (TAL) is a novel concept in LTE systems, which allows a more flexible configurations, expecting to reduce the overall signaling overhead. In this paper, we first present a ”rule of thumb” method to allocate and assign TALs for a network. The easily applied approach does not require any data other than what is available for conventional TA design. Second we compare the performance of an optimum conventional TA design with the suggested TAL design for a large scale network in Lisbon, Portugal. A thorough computation is done to make a justified evaluation. We follow the comparison during specific time intervals for one complete day, and we illustrate the performance of reconfiguration for each approach. The results clearly demonstrate the ability of dynamic TAL in reducing the signaling overhead and maintaining a good performance due to reconfiguration compared to the conventional TA design.