The Cost Efficient Location Management in the LTE Picocell/Macrocell Network

The discontinuous coverage of picocells causes the increased registration signaling overhead in the picocell/macrocell network where the dense picocells overlapped with a macrocell are partitioned into small Tracking Areas (TAs). The approach known as Delay Registration (DR) algorithm is proposed for overhead reduction with the expense of sacrificing the traffic offloading capability of the picocell in such case. However, its feasibility is greatly restricted because its effective implementation requires the accurate estimation of the mobile station (MS) information. We design a new scheme to enable both the low signaling cost location update without the complicated information estimation and the traffic offloading using the inter-cell handover. The theoretical analysis and the simulation experiments are conducted for the performance evaluation. The results show that our solution is superior to the DR algorithm in reducing the signaling cost while achieving the better adaptability to the high and diverse mobility environment.