Mobility management for personal communications systems

Using a combination of empirical data and theoretical models, this paper develops a model of user behavior for a personal communications system environment. This model is used to analyze a mobility management strategy that combines automatic updates by the users-either when they make significant moves or when they go extended periods without network interaction; multiple hysteresis in the form of dynamic registration areas and delayed updates; and a focused paging strategy that minimizes the number of pages given a constraint on the time allowed to a page. Over a range of system and user parameters, the total paging and update traffic can be kept below 1 per 2000 user seconds. The impact on the user's handset is less than ten brief updates per day. The total traffic is only a factor of three more than the minimum, immobile users case