Location management strategies for cellular mobile networks

Location management in mobile communication systems is concerned with those network functions necessary to allow the users to be reached whereever they are in the network coverage area. The basic operations for that purpose-paging and location updating-are resource-consuming since both involve signalling over the radio link between the mobile stations and base stations. Future cellular mobile communication networks (wireless personal communication networks (PCN) will have to support a large number of users, so a significant amount of radio signalling can be expected. This paper describes the conventional location management strategy (the one used in modern cellular systems like the Global system for Mobile communications (GSM) and reviews, describes and comments on some alternative location management proposals for future high-density PCN environments that aim to reduce this expected high (radio) signalling load.