Design of location areas for cellular mobile radio networks

In order to track the location of a mobile terminal in a cellular mobile network, the radio coverage area of a network is partitioned into clusters of base stations, called location areas. As mobile terminals cross the boundaries of location areas, a significant overhead location-updating traffic is injected into the controlling signaling network. The intent of this paper is to solve the problem of designing location areas for a given network such that the load of location-update-signaling traffic on the signaling network is minimized in the context that the intracluster communication is less expensive than the inter-cluster communications. In order to solve the problem, a two-phase matrix-decomposition based recursive algorithm is presented in the present paper. The proposed algorithm partitions a cellular network into required number of location areas in a hierarchical fashion, and is capable of generating an optimal or near optimal solution in very short times. By considering a range of network problems, it is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can be applied to solve large-scale location area design problems.