Movement-Based Location Management for General Cell Residence Times in Wireless Networks

Location management of mobile users is of primary importance in personal communication networks (PCNs), and it is mainly aimed to facilitate the delivery of incoming calls to destination users and to make a more efficient use of network resources. In practical PCNs, the location management algorithms need to keep track of mobile users in a dynamic manner, and it is a design concern to minimize the generated signaling traffic. In this paper, we present the cost analysis for the dynamic movement-based location update scheme. Our model is based on renewal theory arguments, and it is general enough to include a variety of probability distributions for modeling cell residence times (CRTs) in hyperexponentially distributed location area residence times and exponentially distributed intercall times. We compare the location update cost for the dynamic and static schemes. We present numerical results regarding the exponential and circular CRT distributions and discuss the optimal threshold distance for location update that minimizes the cost of the dynamic movement-based scheme.