Dynamic location management in LEO networks

Mobility management is an important aspect in LEO systems. In terrestrial wireless networks, the movement of the user triggers location updating and determines the paging scheme, while in LEO satellite systems, location updating and paging is mainly based on the movement of satellites. Terrestrial location management techniques must be altered to fit LEO systems. The paper introduces a modified movement-based location update and paging scheme in LEO networks. We propose the meta-cell concept, which includes two spot-beams of one satellite. First, we present a location management scheme based on the architecture with a meta-cell location area. Then, an analytical model is applied to formulate the cost of location updating and location paging for the movement and meta-cell based dynamic location update scheme. The comparison of performance between the meta-cell architecture method and the conventional signal-spot-cell architecture method is provided to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme under various parameters. To reduce the impact of meta-cell architecture on location paging cost, we present a forced location update strategy which is used in the case that the meta-cell includes two spot-beams from different satellites.