The design of location areas in a GSM-network

The operator of a cellular radio network of the GSM-standard has to group the cells of the network to location areas. When a mobile station in idle mode changes from one cell to the other the mobile station informs the network of its change only if the new cell belongs to a different location area. When an incoming call arrives, a paging message needs only be sent in those cells belonging to the location area where the mobile station has last performed location updating. The operator has to balance the amount of paging messages with the amount of location updatings. We present an algorithm for the design of location areas which has been developed for the German GSM-network D1 operated by the DeTeMobil.