Location area planning in personal communication services network for handoff cost minimization

Location area planning plays a major role in personal communication services network (PCSN) to resolve issues like minimization of signaling loads generated in the network to provide services like paging or handoff to every mobile user. Whenever a mobile terminal roams around within the total service area with a call in progress and if it crosses the boundary of a location area then, it would request for one or more handoffs depending upon the call duration and its mobility rate. In this respect the planning of location area deserves significant consideration, as average number of handoff requests directly depends on incoming handoff request patterns and human mobility, which are stochastic in nature. These two in-deterministic phenomena actually dictate the size of the location area. This demands for a design consideration for finding out the optimum number of micro-cells, which can be assigned to a mobile switching center (MSC) so that the total network cost incurred for performing successful handoffs can be minimized. In this work, we aim to find out the optimal size of a location area by assigning micro-cells to the MSCs within a complete coverage area, in an optimum manner so as to minimize the total cost which includes two types of cost, namely the handoff cost between micro-cells and cable cost for the wired-connections between the base stations (BS) of each micro-cell and the MSC to which the micro-cell is assigned. We solve the cell to switch assignment (CSA) problem addressing issues like the call arrival characteristic and users' mobility pattern, which were not considered in existing classical CSA algorithms.