Group registration for reducing signaling traffic in location tracking

In this paper, a new location registration strategy - group registrations for mobile networks is proposed, in which instead of sending a location registration request to the home location register (HLR) for each registration area (RA) change of a mobile terminal (MT), the identifications of the MTs newly moving into an RA are buffered and sent to the HLR for location registration when the next incoming call to the RA occurs, i.e., the buffered MT identifications are forwarded to the HLR in the route response message of the call. Upon RA change, a forwarding pointer is set up from the MT´s local anchor to its new visitor location register (VLR), so that incoming calls to the MT can be delivered before the MT´s local anchor is changed to its current VLR via the next group registration. An analytic model is developed and numerical results are presented. It is revealed that compared to the conventional RA-based location registration scheme, the group registration strategy can achieve a significant cost savings over a wide range of system parameters.