A tracking area list configuration method to mitigate burst location updates

The quality of the services provided by cellular networks is negatively affected by the mobility management signal burst traffic caused by simultaneous movement of user equipment in mass transportation vehicles. Long Term Evolution networks track the location of a user equipment at the granularity of a tracking area list (TAL). This strategy supplies a flexible mechanism for reducing and distributing the signaling loads for mobility management. However, it is not clear how to effectively mitigate the burst location update signals caused by mass transportation systems by taking advantage of TALs. Therefore, we propose a tracking area list configuration method by solving an optimization problem. The proposed method detects the cells with burst location updates from the location update records and generates rules for the TAL configuration that selectively mitigates the burst location updates.