Location Management in Cellular Mobile Networks

Increasing traffic generated from users and different QoE requirements has increased the importance of LM recently. This increasing importance has given way to the development of newer and intelligent schemes as well as the modification of the existing ones. In this article, we have discussed various methods proposed for the two important LM functions, LU and paging. The features, relative performances, and inherent disadvantages associated with each of them have been thoroughly dealt with. Studies reveal that the performance of different LU and paging schemes is largely affected by the user mobility pattern and call arrival characteristics. Further, the newly devised schemes are often associated with tremendous implementation complexity as well as large computational overhead, and require smarter MTs/ networks. For a given network, the best design will include a scheme, or a set of schemes, that provides the best compromise between performance and implementation constraints and is often sub-optimum for a different network.