Strategies for Minimizing the Average Cost of Paging on the Air Interface

Location Management of mobile users in a cellular network covers tracking and paging (searching) functionality. In this paper a sequential search strategy is proposed which reduces the signaling on the air interface and also considers the user’s privacy using implicit addresses. After introducing some related work on paging and reducing the costs of paging, the basic idea of the search strategy is described. The used paging methods are crucial for the effectiveness of this strategy. For that, three different paging methods are proposed using fixed and variable segment sizes. The methods are evaluated according to their costs in terms of delay, bandwidth and paging steps. For that the model is described we used for our simulations. Metrics are defined to evaluate the strategies before presenting our results using an event-driven simulation.