Reduction in location management signaling costs by the use of subpopulation-taylored location area sizes

In this paper is examined the importance of adapting the location area sizes to the characteristics of the users in a situation where the user population contains several subpopulations with different mobility and traffic characteristics. For that purpose the location management signaling costs for a system operating with a single location area size optimized for the whole population, and a system operating with different location area sizes optimized on a subpopulation basis, are obtained. An example is presented for a typical urban PCS scenario which shows that a reduction of approximately 13% in signaling can be obtained just by using two distinct location area sizes.