Timer based dynamic location management

The mobility management schemes of current cellular systems (e.g., GSM) use spatially static location areas (LA). The mapping of cells to location areas is performed infrequently using heuristics and aggregate statistics and resulting location areas apply to all the mobile subscribers. As all the subscribers do not have the same mobility patterns, these static and globally applicable location areas are far from optimal. The paper introduces a timer based dynamic location management algorithm, which uses the mobility of an individual subscriber and a timer for the user's current cell to form individualized location areas dynamically. An activity based mobility model is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and to compare it with dynamic location management with variable size location area (Ajit Pal and Digvijay Singh Khati, Int. Conf. on Computer Networks and Mobile Computing, 2001). According to simulation results, the proposed algorithm incurs significantly lower location management cost as compared to dynamic location management with variable size LA.