A new location management strategy based on user mobility pattern for wireless networks

For a wireless network to effectively deliver services to the mobile users, it must have an efficient way to track then. The location management fulfills this task through location registration and paging. Many location management strategies, such as the profile-based scheme (PBS) have been proposed to reduce the signaling traffic caused by the location update and paging. In the PBS scheme, the system collects the user mobility history and stores the information in the user profile. If the user follows the pattern, no update is needed. When a call arrives, the user is paged in the location areas in the descending order of probabilities until the user is found. In this paper, we propose a new scheme - MPBS: mobility-pattern-based scheme - which incorporates both the mobility pattern and time information in the profile. The user location is determined by the system based on not only the distribution probability but also the system time. In the MPBS scheme, a mobile user can be in one of four identified states and different location update and paging strategies are used for different states. Performance evaluation of the proposed scheme is carried out under various mobility-call patterns, paging cost and distribution probability. The results show that the MPBS scheme incurs significantly less signaling traffic and less paging delay than the PBS scheme.