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.     

Optimal Sequential Paging in Cellular Wireless Networks

In a high-capacity cellular network with limited spectral resources, it is desirable to minimize the radio bandwidth costs associated with paging when locating mobile users. Sequential paging, in which cells in the coverage area are partitioned into groups and paged in a non-increasing order of user location probabilities, permits a reduction in the average radio costs of paging at the expense of greater delay in locating the users. We present a polynomial time algorithm for minimizing paging cost under the average delay constraint, a problem that has previously been considered intractable. We show the conditions under which cluster paging, a simple heuristic technique proposed for use with dynamic location update schemes, is optimal. We also present analytical results on the average delay and paging cost obtained with sequential paging, including tight bounds.     

Location management of correlated mobile users in the UMTS

In this paper, we propose concurrently searching for correlated mobile users in mobile communications networks. Previous work either focuses on locating a single mobile user or assumes that the locations of mobile users are statistically independent. We first propose a mobility model in which the movements of mobile users are statistically correlated. Next, we use the theory of Markov chain to derive the joint probability density function of the locations of mobile users. In addition, we propose a novel approach to discover the correlations among the locations of mobile users without explicitly calculating the joint probability density function. Our simulation results indicate that exploring the correlations among the locations of mobile users could significantly reduce the average paging delay and increase the maximum stable throughput.     

Non-Blocking Pipeline Paging with Known Location Probabilities for Wireless Systems

Paging schemes for wireless systems have been well studied in the literature. However, most schemes are considered on per user basis. In these schemes, when an incoming call arrives at a mobile terminal (MT), a paging request (PR) is put in a queue. PRs are served in an FIFO manner. When a PR is served, a search process is carried out to find the corresponding MT in a location area (LA). Most schemes study how to achieve a better performance in terms of cost with/without delay constraints per PR, and totally ignore other PRs in the queue until the MT is found or all the cells in the LA have been paged. In this paper, we propose a non-blocking pipeline probability paging scheme, which assumes known knowledge on location probabilities of individual MTs, under a paging delay constraint, where the location probability of an MT in a cell is the probability that the MT is in the cell. The proposed scheme is independent of the number of PRs in the queue and the arrival rate of PRs. Our study shows that the proposed scheme outperforms both the sequential probability paging scheme with known knowledge on location probabilities of individual MTs and the blanket paging scheme in terms of discovery rate and the total delay. Finally, we study several optimization problems with quality of service constraint for the pipeline probability paging scheme.     

Effective Paging Schemes with Delay Bounds as QoS Constraints in Wireless Systems

In this paper new paging schemes are presented for locating mobile users in wireless networks. Paging costs and delay bounds are considered since paging costs are associated with bandwidth utilization and delay bounds influence call setup time. In general, location tracking schemes require intensive computation to search for a mobile terminal in current PCS networks. To reduce the paging costs, three new paging schemes, reverse, semi-reverse and uniform, are introduced to provide a simple way of partitioning the service areas and decrease the paging costs based on each mobile terminal's location probability distribution. Numerical results demonstrate that our approaches significantly reduce the paging costs for various probability distributions such as uniform, truncated discrete Gaussian, and irregular distributions.     

Intelligent paging strategies for third generation mobiletelecommunication systems

Location management procedures, in conjunction with the millions of users expected to subscribe to third generation mobile telecommunication systems, will generate a huge signaling load. In this paper, we propose a method which aims at the reduction of signaling overhead on the radio link produced by the paging procedure. The key idea is the application of a multiple step paging strategy which operates as follows: at the instance of a call terminating to a mobile user who roams within a certain location area, paging is initially performed in a portion of the location area (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 analyzed in terms of network performance and quality of service (paging signaling, paging delay, processing power requirements), via a simulation tool which models a realistic city area environment     

IP Paging Service for Mobile Hosts

In wireless networks, mobile hosts must update the network with their current location in order to get packets delivered. Paging facilitates efficient power management at the mobile host by allowing the host to update the network less frequently at the cost of providing the network with only approximate location information. The network determines the exact location of a mobile host through paging before delivering packets destined to the mobile host. In this paper, we propose the concept of paging as an IP service. IP paging enables a common infrastructure and protocol to support the different wireless interfaces such as CDMA, GPRS, wireless LAN, avoiding the duplication of several application layer paging implementations and the inter-operability issues that exist today. We present the design, implementation, and detailed qualitative and quantitative evaluation, using measurements and simulation, of three IP-based paging protocols for mobile hosts.     

An analysis of location record checkpointing interval for mobility database in PCS networks

Mobility database that stores the users’ location records is very important to connect calls to mobile users on personal communication networks. If the mobility database fails, calls to mobile users may not be set up in time. This paper studies failure restoration of mobility database. We study per-user location record checkpointing schemes that checkpoint a user’s record into a non-volatile storage from time to time on a per-user basis. When the mobility database fails, the user location records can be restored from the backup storage. Numeric analysis has been used to choose the optimum checkpointing interval so that the overall cost is minimized. The cost function that we consider includes the cost of checkpointing a user’s location record and the cost of paging a user due to an invalid location record. Our results indicate that when user registration intervals are exponentially distributed, the user record should never be checkpointed if checkpointing costs more than paging. Otherwise, if paging costs more, the user record should be always checkpointed when a user registers.     

Location area planning and cell-to-switch assignment in cellular networks

Location area (LA) planning plays an important role in cellular networks because of the tradeoff caused by paging and registration signalling. The upper boundary for the size of an LA is the service area of a mobile services switching center (MSC). In that extreme case, the cost of paging is at its maximum but no registration is needed. On the other hand, if each cell is an LA, the paging cost is minimal but the cost of registration is the largest. Between these extremes lie one or more partitions of the MSC service area that minimize the total cost of paging and registration. In this paper, we seek to determine the location areas in an optimum fashion. Cell to switch assignments are also determined to achieve the minimization of the network cost. For that purpose, we use the available network information to formulate a realistic optimization problem, and propose an algorithm based on simulated annealing (SA) for its solution. Then, we investigate the quality of the SA-based technique by comparing it to greedy search, random generation methods, and a heuristic algorithm.     

From optimal search theory to sequential paging in cellularnetworks

We propose a novel paging strategy based on the theory of optimal search with discrete efforts. When compared to conventional paging methods, the proposed scheme increases the mobile station discovery rate while decreasing the average number of times that a mobile station has to be paged in a location area. The proposal is fully compatible with existing cellular structures, and requires minimal computational power in the mobile switching centers     

Information-Theory Based Optimal Location Management Schemes for Integrated Multi-System Wireless Networks

In a multisystem environment where a mobile node can utilize multiple interfaces and simultaneously connect to multiple providers, new opportunities exist for efficient location management strategies spanning heterogeneous cellular wireless networks. In this paper, an integrated framework is developed for location management in such a multi-system, fourth generation (4 G) wireless networks. This information-theoretic framework allows each individual sub-system to operate fairly independently, and does not require the knowledge of individual sub-network topologies. An efficient location management in such a loosely coupled network is designed by having a mobile node view its movement as a vector-valued sequence, and then transmit this sequence in an entropy coded form to the network. We demonstrate how an intelligent, integrated paging strategy must consider the joint residence probability distribution of a mobile node in multiple sub-networks. We prove that the determination of an optimal paging sequence is NP-complete, and also propose an efficient greedy heuristic to compute the paging sequence, both without and with bounds on the paging delay. Three different location tracking strategies are proposed and evaluated; they differ in their degrees of centralized control and provide tradeoff between the location update and paging costs. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our proposed schemes can result in more than 50% savings in both update and paging costs, in comparison with the basic movement-based, multi-system location management strategy.     

TMSI寻呼与选择性鉴权的使用

为了防止非法个人或团体通过监听无线路径上的信令交换而窃得移动用户真实的用户识别码（IMSI,International Mobi1e Subscriber Identification Number）或跟踪移动用户的位置,现在大多数交换机都开启了临时识别码（TMSI,Temporary Mobi1e Subscriber Identny）寻呼。而为了降低网络信令负荷,交换机可以将鉴权功能有选择性的打开。当TMSI寻呼和选择性鉴权同时打开时,有可能会造成用户的使用问题。这里主要讨论了TMSI寻呼和选择性鉴权的基本原理,并且根据在现网维护中遇到的用户投诉和河南部分交换机的设置分析二者同时打开时对网络的影响。     

An adaptive location management scheme for mobile broadband cellular systems

This paper presents an adaptive location management strategy that considers both location updating and paging by evaluating realistic mobility patterns. It proposes the design of an adaptive macro-location area based on multi-registration adapted to the terminals’ trajectory to reduce location updates. The solution includes an estimation of residence probabilities in the areas of the multi-registered list. This facilitates the design of a sequential paging scheme that reduces the average paging cost. Results show the capability of the solution to adapt to mobility patterns and traffic conditions in the network to minimize the overall location cost. Furthermore, the multi-registration approach and the reduced complexity in both network infrastructure and mobile terminals make the solution suitable for new packet-based broadband cellular systems.     

Two-stage ensemble paging strategy for cellular communicationsystems

Instead of per user basis, we propose a simple paging strategy based on the consideration of ensemble paging channel resource of each cell. Using only the information of the last known locations of mobile subscribers, the proposed paging scheme under a maximum delay constraint can improve the system performance (discovery rate, blocking rate, and average paging delay) significantly in the heavy load     

State-based paging/registration: a greedy technique

For a mobile unit moving according to some ergodic stochastic process, we show how to minimize the expected average cost of paging and registration based on system state information. Specifically, we assume that both the system and mobile unit (user) have access to or can derive the following: the user location probability distribution as a function of time given the last location known to the system, and the time elapsed since this last known location. We then derive methods by which the user decides whether to register based on the following: current location (x), the time elapsed since last contact with the system (t), the paging cost F(x_t,x₀,t) to be incurred by the system at time t given the current location x_t and the last known location x₀, i.e., the user knows the paging strategy to be used by the system for each time t. If x and t define the system state, the method can be called “state based”. Since the optimization is based only on the current expected cost rate and not that of all registration intervals, the method is “greedy”. The greedy method was compared to a timer-based method using a simple diffusive motion process. Reductions in the average paging registration cost of approximately 10% were observed. The more striking improvement was a reduction in the variability of paging/registration costs by a factor of three. Thus, taking both cost and variability reduction as a performance measure, even suboptimal inclusion of location information in the registration decision affords substantial improvement     

A dynamic location management scheme for next-generation multitierPCS systems

Global wireless networks enable mobile users to communicate regardless of their locations. One of the most important issues is location management in a highly dynamic environment because mobile users may roam between different wireless systems, network operators, and geographical regions. A location-tracking mechanism is introduced that consists of intersystem location updates and intersystem paging. Intersystem update is implemented by using the concept of boundary location area, which is determined by a dynamic location update policy in which the velocity and the quality of service are taken into account on a per-user basis. Also, intersystem paging is based on the concept of a boundary location register, which is used to maintain the records of mobile users crossing the boundary of systems. This mechanism not only reduces location-tracking costs, but also significantly decreases call-loss rates and average-paging delays. The performance evaluation of the proposed schemes is provided to demonstrate their effectiveness in multitier personal communication systems     

A crossing-tier location update/paging scheme in hierarchical cellular networks

Location update/paging strategies have been widely studied in the traditional single-tier cellular networks. We propose and evaluate a novel crossing-tier location update/paging scheme that can be used in a hierarchical macrocell/microcell cellular network. Location update is proceeded only in the macrocell tier, where a location area (LA) is made up by larger macrocells. A mobile user will stay in such a LA for longer time. Therefore, the cost on location update can be reduced due to the decreased frequency of location update. To reduce the paging delay, the paged mobile user will be searched in the macrocell tier only when the paging load is not high. Otherwise, it will be searched in the microcell tier, where a sequential searching method is applied. The operation for the scheme is simple, as the macrocell/microcell cellular network has the advantage because a mobile user can receive a signal from both a microcell and the overlaid macrocell. Analytical models have been built for cost and delay evaluation. Numerical results show that, at relatively low cost, the crossing-tier scheme also achieves low paging delay.     

Mobile user location update and paging under delay constraints

Wireless personal communication networks (PCNs) consist of a fixed wireline network and a large number of mobile terminals. These terminals are free to travel within the PCN coverage area without service interruption. Each terminal periodically reports its location to the network by a process calledlocation update. When a call for a specific terminal arrives, the network will determine the exact location of the destination terminal by a process calledterminal paging. This paper introduces a mobile user location management mechanism that incorporates a distance based location update scheme and a selective paging mechanism that satisfies predefined delay requirements. An analytical model is developed which captures the mobility and call arrival pattern of a terminal. Given the respective costs for location update and terminal paging, the average total location update and terminal paging cost is determined. An iterative algorithm is then used to determine the optimal location update threshold distance that results in the minimum cost. Analytical results are also obtained to demonstrate the relative cost incurred by the proposed mechanism under various delay requirements.     

A novel location management scheme for cellular overlay networks

In Beyond Third Generation (B3G) wireless communications, multiple overlays of wireless access networks may cooperate to allow a user access to novel services, the future demands of which will significantly increase the load on location management systems within the networks. In this paper, we introduce the reader to our novel proposals for providing efficient Mobile Terminal (MT) Location Discovery and Paging across an inter-worked network consisting a Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) network and Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) network. We further present numerical and simulation analyzes of our scheme. The numerical and simulation results allow broadcast and cellular network operators to configure their inter-worked system to reduce location management and paging costs whilst controlling average latency. Our results demonstrate that our UMTS LA plus DVB paging schemes offer promise for efficient MT discovery in an inter-network environment that includes uni-directional broadcast network such as DVB; under realistic scenarios we achieve a minimum 4 times reduction in paging cost across the inter-network compared with independent paging systems. Furthermore, we briefly introduce further aspects of research that must be addressed in order to fully evaluate our proposals.     

Movement-based location update and selective paging for PCSnetworks

This paper introduces a mobility tracking mechanism that combines a movement-based location update policy with a selective paging scheme. Movement-based location update is selected for its simplicity. It does not require each mobile terminal to store information about the arrangement and the distance relationship of all cells. In fact, each mobile terminal only keeps a counter of the number of cells visited. A location update is performed when this counter exceeds a predefined threshold value. This scheme allows the dynamic selection of the movement threshold on a per-user basis. This is desirable as different users may have very different mobility patterns. Selective paging reduces the cost for locating a mobile terminal in the expense of an increase in the paging delay. We propose a selective paging scheme which significantly decreases the location tracking cost under a small increase in the allowable paging delay. We introduce an analytical model for the proposed location tracking mechanism which captures the mobility and the incoming call arrival patterns of each mobile terminal. Analytical results are provided to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of the proposed scheme under various parameters