An Enhanced Adaptive Location Update Scheme for Next Generation PCS Networks

Locating users as they move from one place to another in a cellular network is a key issue that allows unrestricted mobility, yet poses several challenging constraints to the network designers. In this paper, an enhanced adaptive location update scheme is proposed to decrease the total cost of the location management process. The proposed scheme relies on the deployment of a direction based location update scheme along with a simple prediction line paging technique to decrease the paging cost. The proposed protocol is implemented over both random walk and random waypoint mobility pattern. Results obtained proved a reduction in the overall cost up to 47% compared to the direction based location update scheme without prediction. Further, the accuracy of the prediction technique for users with varying speed is increased by issuing a location update message periodically. The slight increase in the update cost is compensated by the savings in the paging cost. This enhancement is implemented over two set of experiments with different cost coefficients. Both produced a reduction in the location management overall cost up to 26% compared to the proposed protocol without the enhancement.