Location Management in PCS Networks Using Base Areas (BAs) and 2 Level Paging (2LP) Schemes

Abstract

The main objective of PCS networks is to provide “anytime-anywhere” cellular services. Accordingly, lost calls as well as the network slow response have become the major problems that hardly degrade the network reliability. Those problems can be overcome by perfectly managing the Mobile Terminals (MTs) locations. In the existing location management (LM) scheme, Location Area (LA) is the smallest unit for registration. A MT must register itself when passing through its LA boundary to a neighboring one. Moreover, such registration takes place at the MTs’ master HLR (even though currently managed by another HLR), which increases communication costs. As a result, existing LM scheme suffers from; (1) excessive location registrations by MTs located around LA boundaries (ping-pong effect) and (2) requiring the network to poll all LA cells to locate the callee MT. In this paper, a novel LM strategy is introduced by restructuring LAs into smaller areas called Base Areas (BAs), which impacts the paging cost. The proposed LM strategy uses caching to reduce unwanted updates and 2LP to reduce paging cost. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme introduces a distinct improvement in network response and tracing process.