Mobility-aware location management scheme in femto/macrocell networks

Recently, the femtocell has been proposed to offload the traffic from the macrocell. In femto/macrocell networks, a location management should be supported to keep track of the current location of a mobile node (MN). Since the conventional mobility management scheme of femto/macrocell networks does not consider mobility pattern of the MN, unnecessary location updates occur. Specifically, when the MN moves along the contour of the femtocell coverage, the MN frequently executes location update which causes high location update cost. To address this problem, we propose a mobility-aware location management (MALM) scheme that the MN does not execute location update in femtocells where the MN stops by while conducting location update at the specific locations expected that the MN stays for a long time. Then, to optimize MALM, a Markov decision process (MDP) problem is formulated and the optimal policy is determined. Evaluation results demonstrate that MALM with the optimal policy can reduce the number of location updates and provide sufficient offloading effect.