Location management methods for third generation mobile systems

This article provides an overview of the means and techniques used for subscriber location management in present cellular mobile networks. The overhead due to location management techniques used in the present cellular systems such as GSM, in particular in high traffic spots, has already been a source of concern and is expected to augment dramatically in future wireless systems. Several proposals have been made in the past addressing the problem associated with the cost of location management. The author provides an overview of these contributions; in particular, he classifies the techniques, mainly into non-memory-based and memory-based approaches. Subsequently, a simple evaluation of the current location updating procedure used in GSM is presented in the context of a PCS framework to illustrate the load placed on the radio channels and on the MSC/VLR processing.