Movement-Based Mobility Management and Trade Off Analysis for Wireless Mobile Networks

Mobility management plays a central role in providing ubiquitous communications services in future wireless mobile networks. In mobility management, there are two key operations, location update and paging, commonly used in tracking mobile users on the move. Location update is to inform the network about a mobile user’s current location, while paging is used for the network to locate a mobile user. Both operations will incur signaling traffic in the resource limited wireless networks. The more frequent the location updates, the less paging in locating a mobile user; thus, there is a trade off in terms of signaling cost. Most trade off analysis in the literature is carried out under the assumption that some time variables are exponentially distributed. However, such assumptions will not be valid, particularly for the wireless Internet. In this paper, we present some general analytical results without these assumptions, which are essential for the general trade off analysis. Specifically, we analytically derive the average number of location updates during the interservice time for a movement-based location update scheme under fairly realistic assumptions, which are crucial for all trade off analysis. Our general analytical results make thorough numerical analysis for finding the optimal mobility management under various network operation scenarios possible.