An intra-LA location update strategy for reducing paging cost

The blanket paging strategy in current mobile networks may waste a lot of wireless bandwidth. While keeping the standard location area (LA) based location update (LU) strategy unchanged, we propose an intra-LA LU scheme to reduce the paging cost. While a mobile terminal (MT) is residing in an LA with a cell called anchor cell, where the MT usually stays for a significant period, an intra-LA LU is performed whenever the MT changes its location between the anchor cell and the rest of cells in the LA. For an incoming call, either the anchor cell or the rest of cells in the LA is paged to locate the MT. Thus the paging cost is greatly reduced, especially when the called MT is located in its anchor cell.