A Survey on Location Management Strategies in Cellular Networks

Abstract — Now-a-days wireless networks have become very popular as they support mobility. Mobile users can access services irrespective of their locations. Wireless networks use cellular architecture for better efficiency. To support mobility the networks must have some mechanism to find terminal’s current position. Location management in cellular network is related to keeping track of mobile terminals. It consists of two operations: Location updating and paging. There is a cost associated with each operation and total location management cost is sum of update cost and paging cost. There is always a trade-off between the two costs, so it is required to define a strategy which can minimize total location management cost. The paper reviews different location update and paging strategies