A Profile-Based Location Strategy and Its Performance

Future microcellular personal communications systems (PCSs) will be characterized by high user density and high mobility. It is expected that registrations will incur a large amount of the radio link signaling traffic. A profile-based strategy (PBS) is proposed to reduce the signaling traffic on the radio link by increasing the intelligence within the fixed network. The system maintains a sequential list of the most likely places where each user is located. The list is ranked from the most to the least likely place where a user is found. When a call arrives for a mobile, it is paged sequentially in each location within the list. When a user moves between location areas in this list, no location update is required. The list may be provided by the user or may be based on each user's past calling history. The method for doing this is outside the scope of this work. This work focuses on the potential performance improvements that can result from maintaining such a list. This paper compares the performance of the proposed strategy to the typical geographic-based location-tracking schemes being implemented in evolving digital cellular and cordless standards. Key performance measures for the comparison are radio bandwidth, fixed network SS7 traffic, and call setup delay. We investigate the conditions under which the PBS performs better than the traditional scheme. Results indicate that over a wide range of parameters, it may be possible to reduce both the radio bandwidth and fixed network signaling load for a modest increase in call setup delay.