Performance of a distributed location management scheme for wireless networks

Location management schemes continue to be a topic of major research. Especially with the upcoming 3G, 4G and wireless LAN technologies, which will bring better services to mobile users, it is anticipated that the mobile user population will continue to increase. Location management schemes comprise of location update and paging procedures. Efforts to introduce an efficient location update scheme results in increased costs in paging and vice-versa. We propose a simple base station controller based location area and paging control, which optimizes the total location management costs and is very simple to implement. This scheme has been evaluated using a mobility model, which has features to study location update rates. These results are compared with some of the more popular dynamic location area schemes. Preliminary comparison results show that the proposed scheme is optimal, when considering network architecture and total costs.