Performance considerations for managing users' mobility in mobile systems

Several strategies have been proposed recently to improve the performance of the location management scheme in mobile networks. In third-generation mobile systems, the influence of mobility on the network performance must be strengthened, mainly due to the huge number of mobile users in conjunction with the small cell size. In this paper, we present a profile-based strategy (PBS) to reduce location update signaling cost by increasing the intelligence of the location procedure. This strategy associates with each user a list of cells where it is likely to be with a given probability in each period of time. The implementation of this strategy has been subject to extensive tests. The results obtained confirm the efficiency and the effectiveness of PBS to significantly reduce the costs of both location updates and call delivery procedures, in comparison with IS-41 and other strategies well-known in the literature.