Location management in cellular mobile radio networks

Location management is the procedure of keeping track of and locating mobile terminals (MTs) in mobile radio communication system so that calls arriving for them can be routed correctly to their current location. The main aim of the Location Management is to track the MTs using minimum overhead traffic. Since the radio bandwidth is a scarce resource in mobile radio communication systems, it is imperative to develop efficient techniques for minimizing this overhead traffic and thereby maximizing the revenue-generating traffic-carrying capacity of the system. Given the cell-crossing rate of MTs, call arrival pattern and other design parameters, the intent of the present paper is to put forward an optimal Location Management scheme which can minimize the volume of registration traffic on the air-interface and the SS7 network. In the present paper, the Location Management problem is developed in terms of a node-capacitated graph-partitioning problem. Cells are modeled as weighted nodes and the arcs between them represent the cell-crossing rate of MTs.