Dynamically adapting registration areas to user mobility and call patterns for efficient location management in PCS networks

In this paper, we propose an extension to the personal communication services (PCS) location management protocol which uses dynamically overlapped registration areas. The scheme is based on monitoring the aggregate mobility and call pattern of the users during each reconfiguration period and adapting to the mobility and call patterns by either expanding or shrinking registration areas at the end of each reconfiguration period. We analytically characterize the trade-off resulting from the inclusion or exclusion of a cell in a registration area in terms of expected change in aggregate database access cost and signaling overhead. This characterization is used to guide the registration area adaption in a manner in which the signaling and database access load on any given location register (LR) does not exceed a specified limit. Our simulation results show that it is useful to dynamically adapt the registration areas to the aggregate mobility and call patterns of the mobile units when the mobility pattern exhibits locality. For such mobility and call patterns, the proposed scheme can greatly reduce the average signaling and database access load on LRs. Further, the cost of adapting the registration areas is shown to be low in terms of memory and communication requirements.