Intelligent Paging Strategies for Third Generation Mobile Telecommunication

The necessity for employing various location management procedures, in conjunction with the millions of users expected to subscribe to third generation mobile telecommunication systems, will generate a huge amount of signalling load. In this paper, we propose a method which aims at the significant reduction of the signalling overhead on the radio link produced by the paging procedure compared to the approach followed in second generation systems like GSM. The key idea here is the application of a multiple step paging strategy which operates as follows: At the instance of a call terminating to a mobile user which roams within a certain location area, paging is initially performed in a portion of the location area (this location area portion constitutes the paging area) that the so-called "paging related information" indicates. On no paging response, the mobile user is paged in the complementary portion of the location area -this phase can be completed in more than one (paging) step. Various "paging related information" elements (e.g., recent interaction information, high mobility flag, etc.) can be used and several "intelligent" paging strategies can be defined. Representative paging strategies are analysed here in terms of network performance and quality of service (paging signalling, paging delay, processing power requirements) via a simulation tool which models a realistic city area environment.