A Location Management Scheme Using Direction Characteristics of Mobile Terminals in Mobile Communication Networks

Recently, as the number of mobile terminals (or users) keeps explosively increasing, the location management to track the mobile terminals in mobile communication networks is becoming more important. However, previous schemes have used static location information without any consideration about the moving direction of a mobile terminal. For a fixed paging area, this results in unnecessary pagings, thus increasing the location management cost. In this paper, we propose a new location management scheme using the direction characteristics of a mobile terminal. The direction vector is defined to represent the moving direction of a mobile terminal and to compute a distance from the cell where a location update occurs to the current cell. The offset operation of direction vectors is also presented to represent the position of a mobile terminal in a paging area. This allows the mobile terminal to determine whether a location update will be performed or not. The mobile terminal can also vary its own paging area dynamically according to its moving direction whenever it moves across its paging area. In addition, we develop an analytical model for the proposed scheme which captures the direction characteristics of a mobile terminal based on the Markov model. Analytical results show that the proposed scheme can reduce location management cost by forming a dynamic paging area along the moving direction of a mobile terminal when compared to other schemes.Ui-Sung Song received his B.S and M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University. Also, he is currently a researcher in the Research Institute of Computer Science and Engineering Technology at Korea University. His research interests include mobile IP, PCS networks, and ad-hoc networks.Joon-Min Gil received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Korea University, Chochiwon, Korea in 1994 and 1996, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea in 2000. From 2001 to 2002, he was a visiting research associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, U.S.A. He is currently a senior research engineer in Supercomputing Center at Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information, Daejeon, Korea. His recent research interests include distributed and mobile computing, wireless networks, Internet computing, P2P networks, and grid computing.Chong-Sun Hwang received his M.S. degree in Mathematics from Korea University, Seoul, Korea in 1970, and his Ph.D. degree in Statistics and Computer Science from the University of Georgia in 1978. From 1978 to 1980, he was an assistant professor at South Carolina Lander State University. He is currently a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University, Seoul, Korea. Since 2004, he has been a Dean in the College of Information and Communications at Korea University. His research interests include distributed systems,distributed algorithm, and mobile computing systems