Reducing the paging signaling load in future mobile communications systems

Future mobile telecommunication systems are obligated to offer advanced multimedia services to a huge number of users. The burden imposed by the signaling operations supporting these services can severely degrade the system performance and lead to congestion problems in network equipment (switches, databases, gateways, etc.). Paging operations in a mobile cellular network are responsible for a large part of the signaling load and, therefore, the issue of how to efficiently conduct them becomes of critical importance. The key to its solution lies on the application of multiple-step paging schemes and on the "proper" planning of paging areas. In this paper we devise and solve a version of the paging area planning problem. In particular, we provide a low complexity algorithm capable of reducing the paging cost, at the price of a moderate increase in the call set-up delay.