Concurrently searching for mobile users in cellular networks

In today´s systems, upon arrival of calls to mobile users, the system attempts to locate the users sequentially (one by one) through a paging operation. In this letter, we propose to concurrently search for a number of mobile users in a mobile network, significantly reducing the cost of locating mobile users. The reduction in the paging costs due to such a concurrent search can be quite substantial, depending on the knowledge of the probabilities of the users´ locations, the number of cells in the network, and the number of mobiles to be located. Additionally, we propose a low-complexity heuristic that reduces the average paging cost by 25%, in the case of no knowledge of probabilities of the mobiles´ locations. With such knowledge, further reduction in the average paging costs of up to 90% can be achieved.