Efficient location management for fast call setup

Fast call setup has recently been one of the key areas of interest for wireless services. Due to the mobility of the user, the network needs to determine the exact location of the mobile prior to establishing a mobile-terminated call. Traditionally, a network uses paging to determine the exact location of the mobile, and this takes anywhere between 500 ms to several seconds. The paper introduces two new efficient location management schemes, which allow the network to keep track of mobile location at the least possible granularity (i.e. sector of a cell) in the network. This improvement allows the network to do a direct call setup without paging the mobile, thus reducing the call setup time. This is accomplished without increasing the effective signaling overhead and hence the location management costs. These schemes also predict the probability of success and the associated resource costs of establishing a direct call, so that the network can decide whether to use the new direct call establishment method or the traditional paging method on case-by-case basis.