A profile-based strategy for managing user mobility in third-generation mobile systems

Several strategies have been proposed recently to improve the performance of the location management scheme in mobile networks. In third-generation mobile systems, the influence of mobility on network performance must be reduced, mainly due to the huge number of mobile hosts in conjunction with the small cell size. In this article we present a profile-based strategy (PBS) to reduce location update signaling cost by increasing the intelligence of the location procedure. This strategy associates with each user a list of cells where she is likely to be at a given probability in each time interval. The implementation of this strategy has been subject to extensive evaluation. The results obtained confirm the effectiveness of PBS in significantly reducing the costs of both location updates and call delivery procedures when compared to IS-41 and other well-known strategies in the literature.