Evaluation of location area planning scenarios in future mobile telecommunication systems

In third generation mobile telecommunication systems, signalling requirements due to location updating and paging are expected to be remarkable, mainly because of the huge number of mobile subscribers. Location area planning is characterised by the trade-off between the number of location updates and the amount of paging signalling that the network has to deal with. Location area planning should be based on criteria which guarantee that signalling load will be kept under tolerable levels. Various approaches for location area planning in a city environment - the worst case environment - are discussed in this paper. The simplest approach is the use of heuristic algorithms for approximating the optimum location area configuration. Then more complex scenarios which are based on geographical criteria (population distribution, highway topology, etc.) are investigated. Finally, user mobility characteristics are taken into account in the most complex scenarios. All scenarios are applied over a simulation model representing a city area, providing us with a very clear view of their performance characteristics,