Distributed cell-centric neighborhood-related location area planning for PCS networks

An intelligent location area planning (LAP) scheme should consider the frequent replannings of location areas (LAs) due to changes in user distribution and mobility patterns along with optimization of location management costs, including location updating and paging costs. Most schemes proposed in the literature are designed through centralized techniques, thus requiring more computing time to plan the LAs. Frequent replannings to accommodate environmental changes make the situation worse. As to the optimization of location management costs, most proposed schemes consider the inter-cell crossing rate as one of the key factors in determining the optimal partitions. In some cases, the inter-cell crossing rate may lead to an unsatisfactory outcome. Another problem is the ping-pong effect which is caused by the fixed borders between any two of LAs. In this paper, we propose a distributed cell-centric neighborhood-related LAP scheme in which each cell acts as the center of an LA and in which highly correlative neighboring cells are bundled into the LA if mobile terminals (MTs) remain within the LA long enough to reduce costs. Moreover, the ping-pong effect will be alleviated because MTs always locate at the center cell of an LA whenever a new location update is performed. Finally, the scheme can be implemented in a distributed manner so the computing time incurred by frequent replannings can be reduced. Simulation results show that our scheme indeed exhibits excellent results.