Efficient location management in PCS

Efficient mobility management for mobile (MS) or portable stations (PS-hand-off, channel assignment, and location management-will play an important role in future personal communication systems (PCS). Among these tasks, location management plays a critical role for wide area roaming. The key elements of location management are location registration/updating, and paging. Efficient paging algorithms may generate relatively less paging traffic such that larger location areas may become plausible to reduce location updating and signalling traffic. Deciding optimum location area size is also affected by the call arrival rate to the cell, cell boundary crossing rate of portable stations, cell size, and the allocated number of voice channels per cell. In this paper, different paging techniques are compared to find the optimum location management method for future PCS environment. To this end, a new technique called paging area updating method (PAUM) is introduced and its performance is analysed. It is shown that, for a low cell boundary crossing rate of portable stations, the proposed PAUM technique outperforms other paging techniques, especially when the call arrival rate is high