Dynamic mobility management for cellular networks: A delayed renewal process approach

Tracking mobile users in cellular wireless networks involves two basic functions: location update and paging. Location update refers to the process of tracking the location of mobile users that are not in conversation. Three basic algorithms have been proposed in the literature, namely the distance-based, time-based, and movement-based algorithms. The problem of minimizing the location update and paging costs has been solved in the literature by considering exponentially distributed Cell Residence Times (CRT) and Inter-Call Time (ICT), which is the time interval between two consecutive phone calls. In this paper we select the movement-based scheme since it is effective and easy to implement. Applying the theory of the delayed renewal process, we find the distribution of the number of cell crossings when the ICT is a mixture of exponentially distributed random variables and the CRT comes from any distribution with Laplace transform. In particular, we consider the case in which the first CRT may have a different distribution from the remaining CRTs, which includes the case of circular cells. We aim at the total cost minimization in this case.