Probability criterion paging area planning in future mobile communications systems

Abstract

Future mobile telecommunications systems are obligated to offer advanced multimedia services to a huge number of users. The burden imposed by the signaling operations supporting these services can severely degrade the system performance and lead to congestion problems in network equipment (switches, databases, gateways, etc.). Paging operations in a mobile cellular network are responsible for a large part of the signaling load and, therefore, the issue of how to efficiently conduct them becomes of critical importance. The key to its solution lies on the application of multiple step paging schemes and on the ‘proper’ planning of paging areas (PAs). In this paper, we devise and solve a version of the PA-planning problem. In particular, we provide a low complexity probabilistic algorithm capable of reducing paging costs. To improve performance, the algorithm uses additional information regarding the locations of last user-network interactions. Numerical results show that significant savings can be achieved compared to a conventional paging scheme.