Location management for the satellite-Universal Mobile Telecommunication System

This paper presents two location management schemes for satellite mobile communication that have been designed by the RACE Monet project for satellite access to the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), the future European 3/sup rd/ generation mobile system. In both scenarios, the Earth is tiled with fixed location areas which are part of the guaranteed coverage area of a fixed Earth station. The difference lies in how the mobile terminal is efficiently paged within its location area, using additional position information. Simple mobility and traffic models are used to derive analytically the paging and the location updating rates. A formula is given for estimating the crossing rate of the border of a single circle. Finally, a performance comparison between the two schemes is presented as a function of the mobility and the traffic parameters. This model allows the computation of the optimum location area size.