Reducing Location Registration Cost in Mobile Cellular Networks

Mobility management is important in mobile cellular networks. In this study, we considered an enhanced locationbased registration (ELR) method. In the ELR method, even when the mobile entering a cell finds that the cell is already on its list and then updates its main counter, the mobile does not remove any cells from the list as far as memory space permits, which gives better performance than the LR method. However, the location registration cost of the ELR method is still high and there is a lot of room for improvement in the location registration cost. We now propose an improved version of the ELR method, the improved ELR (iELR). In the iELR method, when a mobile entering a cell finds that the cell counter value is less than the main counter value, or when a mobile enters a cell to register its location, it updates the main counter and the cell counters as much as possible, to reduce the future need for registrations. We have shown that our proposed iELR method provides better performance than the ELR method.