Location Management in Mobile Computing

Riky Subrata Albert Y. Zomaya

Parallel Computing Research Lab, Dept of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Western Australia 6907, I subra-r, zomaya } @ee uwa .edu. au. .
Abstract - This paper discusses wireless networks and location management schemes - which consist of location updates and location inquiries. The paper provides a survey of a large number of location updates and location inquiries strategies that have been proposed in the literature over the years. As well, methods for evaluating the performances of different location management schemes, including users mobility and call arrival patterns, are presented.

1 INTRODUCTION

One of the challenges facing mobile computing is the tracking of the current location of users - the area of location management. In order to route incoming calls to appropriate mobile terminals, the network must from time to time keep track of the location of each mobile terminal. Mobility tracking expends the limited resources of the wireless network. Beside the bandwidth used for registration and paging between the mobile terminal and base stations, power is also consumed from the portable devices. Furthermore, frequent signaling may result in degradation of Quality of Service (QoS), due to interferences. On the other hand, a miss on the location of a mobile terminal will necessitates a search operation on the network when a call comes in. Such an operation, again, requires the expenditure of limited wireless resources. The goal of mobility tracking, or location management is to balance the registration and search operation, so as to minimize the cost of mobile terminal location tracking [l- 3,5].
2 LOCATION MANAGEMENT

Location management, or the tracking of mobile users location inside the network, involves two elementary operations of location update and location inquiry. Location update is initiated by a mobile terminal, and is used to inform the network

of its current location inside the network. This is done so as to limit the search space, should the need arise, to locate the user at a later point in time. That is, location update strategies, while not necessary, is used so as to reduce the amount of signaling required to locate a mobile terminal, should the need arises. In location inquiry, the system initiates the search for a user. The system can do this by polling cells where the user might be in. Obviously, the system can simply do a network-wide search by simultaneously polling all the cells in the network. However, the overhead for this would be very high. Instead, the system can try to limit or start the search on cells where the user might likely be in - the domain of intelligent paging. Intelligent paging is desirable since the changes are made to the system and not to the mobile terminal itself, which can be numerous. However, it should be noted that the ability to limit the search space is strongly dependent on a good location update strategy. In many cases, it is desirable to impose a maximum allowable t h e delay in locating a user. This added time constraint adds to the complexity of update schemes, and schemes that work well with no delay constraint may need to be adjusted to work well under the delay constraint.
3 COST

To be able to effectively compare the

0-7695-1165-1/01$10.00 0 2001 IEEE

287

different location management techniques available, one needs to associate with each location management technique a value, or cost. As noted above, location management involves two elementary operations of location update and location inquiry, as well as network interrogation operations. Clearly, a good location update strategy would reduce the overhead for location inquiry. At the same time, location updates should not be performed excessively, as it expends on the limited wireless resources. To determine the average cost of a location management strategy, one can associate a cost component to each location update performed, as well as to each polling/paging of a cell. The most common cost component used is the wireless bandwidth used (wireless traffic load imposed on the network). That is, the wireless traffic from mobile terminals to base stations (and vice-versa) during location updates and location inquiry. The total cost of the above two cost components (location update and cell paging) over a period of time T, as determined by simulations (or analytically) can then be averaged to give the average cost of a location management strategy.
4 USERS PAlTERN

longer accurately reflects reality, as there is now a whole range of users with very different mobility patterns. While there have been many approaches suggested to model human movement, there seems to be an agreement on the model for call arrivals. The usually implemented model comes from queuing theory, that of Poisson arrival rate, or exponential interarrival rate.
5 LOCATION UPDATE STRATEGIES

In the area of location management, two mobile users patterns are of interest: their mobility pattern, and their call arrival pattern. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to model a mobile users movement pattern. In the memory-less movement model, the users next cell location doesnt depend on hisher previous cell location. That is, the next cell location is selected with equal probability from the neighboring cells. In the Markovian model, neighboring cells have different probability of being the user next cell location. Other probability models have also been proposed. With portable communication devices becoming more and more common in everyday life, simple probability models no

Location update is one of the main problems in mobile computing and wireless network. Ideally, an update strategy should efficiently use the limited resources of the network, and does not require excessive computing power at the mobile terminal. This is especially true in the dynamic update strategy (discussed below), where many of the calculations need to be done at the mobile termiial. Further, it should be (easily) scalable to accommodate future expansion of the network. In the static update strategy, location update is performed independent of each users mobility and call arrival patterns. On the other hand, dynamic strategies take into account each users mobility and call arrival patterns. Undoubtedly, the static update strategy is the easiest to implement in a network, and requires minimal processing power on the mobile terminal. Still, some of the strategies can be implemented both statically, and dynamically.
6 LOCATION INQUIRIES

In its simplest form, locating a mobile terminal can be performed by simultaneously paging all the cells within the network. This technique will also takes the least time to locate a mobile terminal. However, this technique will result in enormous signaling traffic, particularly for moderate to large networks [ 6 ] . Note that, in the case of location area strategies, the simultaneous polling needs to be done only on the cells within a location

288

area, as the required mobile terminal would be in a cell within its location area. One simple improvement to simultaneously paging all the cells within the network is to group cells into paging areas (PA). Cells within each paging area are polled simultaneously. Each paging area can then be polled sequentially, until the required user is found. It should be noted, however, that this method would result in time delay in locating a mobile user, especially in large networks. However, the size of the paging areas can be easily adjusted to accommodate any delay constraint, or quality of service (QoS) requirements of the network. In the case of a network with location areas (LA), each paging area can correspond to a location area. Altematively, one location area may contain several paging areas. The number of paging areas within a location area can be determined, among other things, by the maximum delay constraint. There is also another variant whereby each mobile terminal performs a location update whenever it crosses a paging area boundary. However, the signaling is only limited to the Mobile Switching Center (MSC), and therefore doesnt affect the systems traffic. Still, this introduces extra signaling traffic from the location update operations. The expanding ring paging tries to improve the sequential paging of paging areas. By using this technique, timeconsuming page area planning can be avoided, and the high time delay that may be incurred using the paging area technique described above can be avoided. In this technique, the last known cell location (or other cell deemed to have the highest location probability) of a mobile terminal is paged first. On a miss, all the cells surrounding the last known cell are paged. This ring of cell paging continues until the required mobile terminal is found. In the case of networks with location area (LA), the ring of cell can be confided to within the location area.

7 CONCLUSIONS

This paper presented some of the different location management techniques that have been proposed in the literature over the last few years. More details can be found in [7].
REFERENCES

1. G.V. Casares and OJ. Mataix, On movement-based mobility tracking strategy-an enhanced version, ZEEE Communications Letters, vol. 2, pp. 457,1998.

2. N.E. Kruijt, D. Sparreboom, F.C. Schoute, and R. Prasad, Location management strategies for cellular mobile networks, Electronics & Communication Engineering Joumal, vol. 10, pp. 64-72, 1998. 3. U. Madhow, M.L. Honig, and K. Steiglitz, Optimization of wireless resources for personal communications mobility tracking, ZEEHACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 3, pp. 698-707,1995.
4. S.K. Sen, A. Bhattacharya, and S.K.

Das, A selective location update strategy for PCS users, Wireless Networks, vol. 5 , pp. 313-26, 1999.
5. S . Tabbane, Location management methods for third generation mobile systems, ZEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 35, pp. 72-8,834,1997.

6. K. Wang, J.M. Liao, and J.M. Chen, Intelligent location tracking strategy in PCS, ZEE Proceedings Communications, vol. 147, pp. 63-8, 2000. 7. R. Subrata and A.Y. Zomaya, Location Management in Mobile Computing: A Survey, Tech Report, Parallel Computing Research Lab, Univ. Western Australia, zomayaeee.uwa. edu. au,2001.

289