Evaluation of distance-based location update and sequential paging in PCS registration system

The growth of cellular subscribers and the increasing communication activities have generated a lot of signaling transactions in PCS network. In location management perspective, the effect of user mobility will affect signaling transactions in location update and paging operations. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of mobility activity and analyze the signaling activities in registration system: visitor location register and home location register. The number of signal transactions in HLR and VLR in terms of network resources is analyzed to obtain an efficient location management strategy. Distanced-based location update and sequential paging approach are used to evaluate the PCS network performance. First, the activity cost calculation is proposed to evaluate the mobility activities under these approaches. Then, three strategies based on location area concept which cells grouped into: single-cell, balanced-cell, and unbalanced-cell are introduced to measure the network performance for location management operations. Each of these strategies incorporates the same cell size but with different number of cells based random mobility model with 1/6 direction probability. The simulation evaluation shows that the number of signaling activity is dependent on user mobility and the chosen strategy. Results show that the location area approach give better signaling activity cost and the balanced-cell strategy outperforms in terms of signaling registration compared to the single-cell and unbalanced-cell strategies.