Review of Location Management in Cellular Networks

Location management is a paramount issue in wireless mobile station communication systems to enable the terminals to continuously receive services when moving from one location to another. In this paper, we study the trends in the latest cellular wireless systems to page terminals, update location area and make handover decisions for a mobile station. Topics covered include static and dynamic location management, dynamic location areas and techniques, future location management developments, location tracking evolution and location management in 3G. It will be shown that location-area based location management methods designed around a profile or history-based direction information offer the best performance, in terms of location management cost, compared to all other alternative approaches while distance based schemes are to be the most efficient ones.