On Lookahead Strategy for Movement-Based Location Update: A General Formulation

Location management deals with the procedure to update the current location of a mobile terminal (MT) and with the procedure to deliver incoming calls to that called MT. Basically, the performance evaluation of location management procedures are dependent on the MT’s mobility behavior, on the MT’s cell residence time and on the call arrival process to the MT. In the open literature, the typical analysis for location management has been addressed under the assumptions of a random walk mobility model, the exponential cell sojourn time of the MT -some times relaxed to a general probability distribution functionand the exponential inter-arrival time distribution for incoming calls. However, the random walk model seems not to be valid as many mobile users follow some daily trajectories, such as from home to the working place, from the working place to the shopping center, etc. To reflect a more realistic movement pattern, we propose a directional oriented mobility model. And as a consequence of that, we also propose a lookahead procedure combined with the movement-based location update scheme, with the main idea of saving signaling traffic through the air interface. In the lookahead strategy we analytically derive closed form expressions for the mean number of location update (LU) messages triggered by the MT between two consecutive call arrivals and the paging probabilities to evaluate the paging cost under some selective paging strategies. The analysis has been carried out assuming a general cell residence time and a renewal point process for call arrivals to the MT.