A location management scheme with layered cells within location areas

Location management, which consists of location updating and location query, is a challenging topic in mobile communication. The location query of the basic location management scheme (basic scheme for short) used in personal communication services (PCS) networks, such as GSM, IS-41 and so forth, in many countries, requires to page all the cells of a location area (LA) simultaneously. Obviously, this scheme is likely to waste the system´s channel resource and processing resource enormously, since the LA is constituted by many cells while the mobile only resides in one cell. This paper proposed a new location management scheme (cell layered scheme for short) that layered all the cells of each LA and paged the cells one layer after another in order of the probabilities from large to small. In addition, both the probability of the mobile residing in each layer and the average number of cell layers paged by the cell layered scheme, are derived. Generally, the cost of the location management of the cell layered scheme is less than that of the basic scheme. Furthermore, the cell layered scheme makes it possible to make efficient use of the limited frequency spectrum efficiently.