Reducing location registration cost in mobile cellular networks

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