Performance of traffic and mobility models for location area code planning

Automatic methods for location area code (LAC) planning in mobile networks require cell-specific information on the expected paging and location update traffic. In order to predict the potential traffic caused by a new location area code plan detailed traffic and mobility maps have to be provided. Potential sources to derive such maps are geographic data (population data, street networks, land use etc.) and performance measurements from the Operations and Maintenance Center (OMC). In this paper simple approaches for traffic and mobility models based on geographic data are investigated. Two basic assumptions in these models are that paging traffic can be derived by the rate of mobile terminated calls (MTC) and that the location update traffic is proportional to inbound hand-over rate. A detailed analysis of the model performance is made by comparing the MTC and hand-over rate predictions with OMC measurements from a real network. In a further step it is shown that a more complex approach based on the MOMENTUM traffic model is able to improve the accuracy of MTC predictions.