Optimal Design of Mobile Controlled Location Update Subsystem

Consider connection-oriented wireless cellular net-works. To establish a circuit or virtual circuit in such a network, a paging message is broadcast over a region at which the destined mobile station is presumed to reside, (identified as a paging area). For an effective paging mechanism, it is desirable to provide the location information of mobile stations to the network. In this paper, we consider a mobile controlled location update scheme under which each mobile station periodically reports its current location information to the network by using an inherent timer (without measuring the power of signals transmitted from base stations). Based on the latest information about a mobile station's location, a paging area is selected to page the mobile station. Note that under this scheme, a mobile station may not yet have reported its location change while sojourning out of the current paging area. In such situation, the mobile station can not receive a paging message destined to it. Frequent location updates can reduce the paging failure rate incurred by mobile stations'sojourning out of the paging area. However, larger bandwidth is needed for location update as the location update rate is increased. On the other hand, as the size of the paging area is increased, the paging failure rate is decreased, while larger bandwidth is required for paging. Thus, we first present a model for mobility, paging and location update processes, and secondly investigate the effect of network parameters on the paging failure rate and the amount of bandwidth used for paging and location update. Finally, we formulate problems to find proper values for the location update rate and paging area size under the constraints on the bandwidth usage levels for location update and paging.