Intelligent location tracking strategy in PCS

Abstract

An alternative strategy (AS) for reducing location update signalling load has been proposed to improve the classical strategy (CS) used in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). However, the AS is suitable only for long-term events and fixed movement tracks. Location tracking (paging) costs more when the mobile host (MH) changes movement habits or encounters short-term events. A novel method is proposed that aims to reduce signalling load resulting from location tracking in the above situations. The key idea is to take user recent movement information (called the paging information record) into account to determine which location area to page first. Performance evaluation has been conducted using a city area zone model that can model a realistic city area environment. Experimental results show that the method can reduce location management signalling costs by 14-55% and 6-39% compared to CS and AS, respectively. The overhead of the approach is the additional storage space required (for storing MH profiles and paging information records) and the additional processing time. However, the overhead is insignificant in terms of today's memory capacity and processor speed, and the reduction in signalling load makes more bandwidth available.