Invited Review
Application of renewal theory to call handover counting and dynamic location management in cellular mobile networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2009.07.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Mobility management in wireless cellular networks is one of the main issues for resource optimization. It is aimed to keep track of Mobile Stations (MSs) in the different Location Areas (LAs) or Registration Areas (RAs) for an efficient call delivery. The optimization issues of these location strategies look for a minimization of the generated signaling traffic. We describe the three basic strategies for location management: distance-based, time-based and movement-based, and their corresponding optimization cost. We emphasize that counting the number of wireless cell crossings or handovers occurring in the call duration time or during inter-call times is a fundamental issue for mobility management analysis. We present the main approaches in the literature to deal with these problems with a special emphasis to renewal theory to model the probabilistic structure of these optimization problems.

Section snippets

Recent approaches for counting the number of handovers

The cellular concept in wireless networks implies to cover the area of a city or populated area with regular or irregular cells. Ideally this layout is formed of non-overlapping hexagon-shaped wireless cells. However, in practical deployed systems the layout is formed with nearly circular cells with a certain degree of overlapping. For capacity planning purposes, a fixed number of channels are assigned to each cell, and the MS can move freely in this layout with MS coming from neighbor cells

Mobility management

A mobile terminal (MT) can travel without geographical restrictions inside a wireless cellular network layout. The network has to keep track of the location of all users inside this topology all the time, i.e., when the user is active in conversation the location is needed to assign network resources in a particular cell, for authentication, and to make handovers to the neighbor cells, and the location is also needed for call delivery purposes when the MT is not active.

An additional element is

Some numerical results

Many plots regarding the behavior of Eq. (2.3.1) have been presented in Rodríguez-Dagnino and Takagi, 2007a, Rodríguez-Dagnino and Takagi, 2007b. In this section we will illustrate the behavior of Eq. (2.3.2) with data similar to the one presented in Figs. 8 and 9 of Wang et al. (2008). In addition, we are including the plots of hyperexponential ICT, i.e., N=2,q1=0.9=1-q2,E[X]=100 sec, E[TL]=2000. It can be observed in Fig. 1, Fig. 2 that the total cost is a convex function of the movement

Conclusions

In this review paper we have presented the most important approaches to calculate the number of handovers, in wireless cellular networks, subject to the condition that the call lasts for a random time. It is important to consider general approaches such that it is possible to incorporate call duration of many multimedia services, including heavy-tailed distributions such as Pareto. We have presented our approach to solve this problem and it is based on renewal theory arguments. We have

Acknowledgement

The first author thanks Tecnologico de Monterrey, for the support provided in the development of the work through the Research Chair of Telecommunications.

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