Mitigating location management traffic via aggregation in multi-hop cellular networks

In high mobility areas such as shopping malls and transportation stations, mobile users tend to move in and out in a bursty fashion, and hence location update (LU) and paging signaling cause substantial traffic burden to the cellular networks, leading to signaling congestion. This poses a great challenge to the system design for wireless cellular systems. Traditional cellular systems cannot cope with this situation very well. However, with the ad hoc operational mode recently introduced into the cellular systems, the added multi-hop relaying via mobile devices provides a new way to mitigate location management traffic. In this paper, based on this new architecture, we propose a novel scheme, called aggregative location management, which aggregates multiple location updates into group location updates. For the scenarios of high capacity transit (HCT) systems, we use this grouping scheme to alleviate the signaling traffic when mobile users in an HCT move into new location areas. For other scenarios with mass arrivals of LU requests, we develop a generic aggregative location management scheme in which LU requests can be first aggregated by designated mobile devices and then are periodically sent to the location registers. Performance evaluation is carried out and shows their significant effectiveness.