Concurrent search of mobile users in cellular networks

In this paper, we propose to concurrently search for a number of mobile users in a wireless cellular network based on the probabilistic information about the locations of mobile users. The concurrent search approach guarantees that all k mobile users will be located within k time slots. It is shown that even in the worst case when mobile users appear equally in all the cells of the network, the concurrent search approach is able to reduce the average paging cost by 25%. More importantly, this is achieved without an increase in the worst case paging delay or in the worst case paging cost. Depending on the total number of mobile users to be located, total number of cells in the network, and the probabilistic information about the locations of mobile users, the reduction of the average paging cost due to the usage of the concurrent search approach ranges from 25% to 88%. The case in which perfect probabilistic information is unavailable is also studied.