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Elimination of generalized ping-pong effects using triple-layers of location areas in cellular networks

Fan Guangbin (Palgloo Inc, Tasman Drive, Santa Clara, USA)
Stojmenović Ivan (SITE, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
Zhang Jingyuan (Computer Science Department, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, USA)

Location-areas is a popular location management scheme in cellular networks In the location areas scheme, a service area is partitioned into location areas, each consisting of contiguous cells. A mobile terminal updates its location whenever it moves into a cell that belongs to a new location area. However, no matter how the location areas are designed, the ping-pong location update effect exists when a mobile terminal moves back and forth between two location areas. The paper defines a new kind of ping-pong effect referred to as the generalized ping-pong effect, and shows that it accounts for a nonnegligible portion of the total location update cost. Although several strategies have been proposed to reduce the ping-pong effect in the literature, they either eliminate no generalized ping-pong effect or introduce a larger paging cost. This paper proposes a triple-layer location management strategy to eliminate the generalized ping-pong effect, therefore greatly reducing the total location update cost. Simulation results show that the triple-layer strategy outperforms the existing schemes designed to reduce the ping-pong effect.

Keywords: cellular networks, location management, location areas, ping-pong effects, triple-layers