Modelling the MSC/VLR processing load due to mobility management

The number of cellular subscribers experiences an exponential increase all over the world. Therefore, telecommunication network operators must deal with a population of subscribers who are more and more mobile. This has as a consequence that telecommunication networks manage a growing amount of traffic and processing due to the mobility management of the subscribers. Dimensioning the mobile switching center has been done for a long time by only considering the user traffic (i.e. traffic related to the telephone service). Because mobility management generates a large amount of signalling and processing, it is now more and more necessary to take the mobility aspects into account when dimensioning and planning a cellular network. In this paper, we focus on the impact of the mobility management on the mobile switching center. We define a list of parameters to take into account for this aim and estimate the overhead (in terms of traffic and processing) due to the management of the subscribers mobility. We take the GSM system as framework and focus on the MSC/VLR entity