Modeling and Performance Analysis of Route-based Group Location Registration

In this study, we propose the route-based group location registration (RGR) method to reduce location registration cost when many mobile stations (MSs) are aboard the transportation system (TS) such as trains. In addition to the existing group location tracking (GLT) method, RGR method seeks to minimize the location registration and paging costs of the TS by taking advantage of the characteristics that the TS moves along a specified route from the starting point to the arrival point. In particular, a scheme is adopted to significantly reduce the cost of location registration of the TS by using the implicit registration effect of call occurrences from/to MSs aboard the TS. We analyze the performance of the proposed RGR method using the semi-Markov process (SMP) model. Using the SMP model, accurate performance is analyzed by reflecting different cell staying times for different states and the general distribution for cell staying time. Numerical results show that the more MSs aboard the TS, the less the cost of location registration due to the GLT and implicit registration effects. The results of this study can be used directly in the study of mobility management in mobile communication network and the analytical method of this study can also be used to analyze the performance of other mobility management methods.