Signaling Reduction for inter-RAT cell reselection

In the areas that different radio access technologies (RATs) overlap with each other, multi-mode user equipment devices (UEs) could perform inter-RAT cell reselection in idle mode. This will result in heavy signaling load over the air interface. One key point to resolve this problem is to reduce the frequency of the location area update procedure. In this paper, a method named as Signaling Reduction for Inter-RAT Cell Reselection (SRICR) is proposed. By means of keeping the registration information of two RATs by UEs, it doubles the location areas that UEs could stay in, so the frequency of the location area update procedure is reduced. Based on the analytical model and simulation results, we also analyze the performance of SRICR.