A contention-free mobility management scheme based on probabilistic paging

In forthcoming personal communication systems (PCSs), small cells are deployed to achieve high spectral efficiency. This has significant impacts on location tracking of mobile users. The increase in location update (LU) load leads to more contention on the reverse control channel. Thus, many algorithms are designed to distribute the LU load to a larger number of cells. This avoids the inefficiency of random accessing due to high offered load. In an alternative approach (Wong 1995), a contention-free LU algorithm is proposed. Two or more mobile units are permitted to register with a base station simultaneously without contention. A probabilistic paging mechanism called Bloom filtering is used to select cells to be paged. Since there is no contention in LU, inefficiencies due to random accessing are bypassed. In this paper, we present another contention-free LU algorithm. It is hybrid in the sense that LUs are temporally or geographically triggered. The use of hybrid LU alleviates inefficiencies inherent to temporal triggered LU in Wong. Three selective paging schemes are considered in this paper. Tradeoff between paging delay and paging bandwidth is addressed. The performance of this algorithm is compared to Wong and other conventional strategies. Numerical results show that the new algorithm compares favorably with previous proposed strategies.