A dynamic mobility tracking policy for wireless personal communications networks

Current personal communications networks (PCNs) employ a cellular architecture such that the PCN coverage area is divided into cells. All MTs within a cell communicate with other MTs through a base station which is installed within the cell. This base station is connected to other base stations and stationary terminals through an underlying wireline network. In order to route incoming calls, each MT reports its location to the network by a process called location update. This paper introduces a location update policy which minimizes the cost of mobile terminal (MT) location tracking. An MT dynamically determines when to perform location update based on its mobility pattern and the incoming call arrival probability. The performance of this scheme is close to that of the optimal policy reported earlier. However, the processing time requirement of this scheme is very low. The minimal computation required by this scheme enables its usage in MTs which has limited energy supply and computational power.