Performance comparison of location areas and reporting centers under aggregate movement behavior mobility models

Location management deals with how to track mobile users within the cellular network. It consists of two basic operations: location update and paging. The total location management cost is the sum of the location update cost and the paging cost. Location areas and reporting centers are two popular location management schemes. The motivation for the study is the observation that the location update cost difference between the reporting centers scheme and the location areas scheme is small whereas the paging cost in the reporting centers scheme is larger than that in the location areas scheme. The paper compares the performance of the location areas scheme and the reporting centers scheme under aggregate movement behavior mobility models by simulations. Simulation results show that the location areas scheme performs about the same as the reporting centers scheme in two extreme cases, that is, when a few cells or almost all cells are selected as the reporting cells. However, the location areas scheme outperforms the reporting centers scheme at the 100% confidence level with all call-to-mobility ratios when the reporting cells divide the whole service area into several regions.