Efficient location area planning for personal communication systems

A central problem in personal communication systems is to optimize bandwidth usage, while providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to mobile users. Network mobility management, and in particular, location management, consumes a significant portion of bandwidth, which is a necessary overhead for supporting mobile users. We focus our efforts on minimizing this overhead. Unlike previous works, we concentrate on optimizing existing schemes, and so the algorithms we present are easily incorporated into current networks. We present the first polynomial time approximation algorithms for minimum bandwidth location management. In planar graphs, our algorithm provably generates a solution that uses no more than a constant factor more bandwidth than the optimal solution. In general graphs, our algorithm provably generates a solution that uses just a factor O (log n) more bandwidth than optimal where n is the number of base stations in the network. We show that, in practice, our algorithm produces near-optimal results and outperforms other schemes that are described in the literature. For the important case of the line graph, we present a polynomial-time optimal algorithm. Finally, we illustrate that our algorithm can also be used for optimizing the handoff mechanism.