MALM: Mobility-Aware Location Management Scheme in Femto/Macrocell Networks

Recently, femtocells are widely deployed to offload the traffic from the macrocell. Since conventional location management schemes of femto/macrocell networks do not consider mobility pattern of the mobile node (MN), unnecessary location updates can occur. Specifically, when an MN moves along the contour of the femtocell coverage, the MN frequently executes location update procedures, which causes significant location update cost. To address this problem, we propose a mobility-aware location management (MALM) scheme, where the MN conducts location update only at specific femtocells in which it is expected that the MN stays for a long time. To optimize MALM, a Markov decision process (MDP) problem is formulated and the optimal policy is determined. Evaluation results demonstrate that MALM with the optimal policy can reduce the number of location updates while providing sufficient offloading gain.