User-independent paging scheme based on mobility rate for mobile IP

Multi-step paging has been widely proposed to reduce signaling overheads. Similar ideas can be applied to Mobile IP to provide IP paging services. However, current proposed multi-step paging schemes are user-dependent under which the partition of paging areas and the selection of paging sequence are different for each user. The performance of a user-dependent paging scheme for individual users may be affected by many factors. This paper introduces a user-independent paging scheme for Mobile IP where the paging criterion is not based on individual user information. The goal of user-independent paging is to provide satisfactory overall performance of the whole system when personalized optimal performance for each user is hard to obtain. The paging criterion adopted is the mobility rate of each subnet determined by the aggregated movements of all mobile users. In order to implement the proposed scheme, a concept of "semi-idle state" is introduced and the detailed solution for obtaining mobility rate is presented Analytical results show that when paging one user at a time, the performance of the proposed scheme is comparable to that of the user-dependent paging schemes. When paging multiple users simultaneously, the proposed scheme has remarkable advantages.