Reduction of Location Update Cost Using Hierarchical Architecture in PCS Networks

Location management schemes dealing with location information of moving terminals play an important role in the personal communications systems (PCS). Since the location management involves heavy signaling traffics to update the location information, reducing the location update cost becomes a critical research issue. This paper proposes a location management scheme which reduces the location update cost by employing the hierarchical structure in PCS environment. The paper also develops analytical models to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The results obtained from the performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional schemes in terms of the location update rates. Also, the difference in the performance becomes larger as the size of the location area (LA) becomes smaller and as the residual time of the mobile user becomes smaller.