Analysis of User Mobility Statistics for Cellular Network Re-Structuring

Mobile network operators often use handover statistics to improve the structure of their networks. However, such statistics only reflect the movement of connected users. In this paper, a thorough investigation of the correlation between idle and connected user mobility statistics is performed based on measurements from a live GSM network. A multiple regression model is proposed to estimate the number of location updates due to mobility and non-mobility reasons on a per-cell basis from measurements in the network management system. Results shown that, although the number of location updates can normally be predicted accurately from handover statistics, especially when aggregated over large geographical areas, large deviations are observed in cells of lower layers in multi-tier networks.