The location area design problem in cellular and personal communications systems

The design of location areas (LA) in cellular and PCS networks is a challenging problem primarily because of the intractability of the underlying mobility models. This paper provides methods to solve this problem and provides efficient methods to design LAs that minimize the impact of paging and registration. For the homogeneous mobile traffic case, we establish the convexity of the cost function and provide a close-form solution. For the heterogeneous mobile traffic case, we (i) propose an approximation scheme to compute the LA size and (ii) show how the VLR area can be split into location areas.