Location management in wireless networks: A survey

The present wireless networks aim to make anywhere and anytime communication possible. The operations which allow networks to achieve this goal have drawn tremendous attention over the recent past. Location management (LM) is one such operation that aims to determine the exact location of mobile devices. LM facilitates the searching or paging process that is performed during the downlink channel acquisition. Various strategies for LM have been proposed so far with each having their own merits and demerits. Specifically, the cost incurred for LM may be traded off against two major design parameters, namely computational overhead and implementation complexity. Before adopting a scheme for future generation wireless standards, these performance metrics needs to be thoroughly compared. We begin with a description of the wireless architecture that is required for understanding basics of LM. Next, variants of the two primary components of LM, location update (LU) and paging, are surveyed.