Optimization of wireless resources for personal communications mobility tracking

Abstract

In personal communications applications, users communicate via wireless with a wireline network. The wireline network tracks the current location of the user, and can therefore route messages to a user regardless of the user's location. In addition to its impact on signaling within the wireline network, mobility tracking requires the expenditure of wireless resources as well, including the power consumption of the portable units carried by the users and the radio bandwidth used for registration and paging. Ideally, the mobility tracking scheme used for each user should depend on the user's call and mobility pattern, so that the current registration area approach (which ignores such information) may be wasteful of wireless resources under certain circumstances. In the paper, the authors provide a model and an optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming for choosing the mobility tracking scheme on a per-user basis. While illustrative results are provided for a simple one-dimensional mobility model, the approach is shown to be applicable to a very general class of problems.