Location Management in PCS Networks

Over the last several years, the worldwide cellular communications market has undergone explosive growth. This can be attributed to several factors, including decreasing prices, improved radio coverage, and compact, lightweight terminals. As the number of users increases given a fixed ratio spectrum allocation, the size of radio coverage cells must decrease, in order to accommodate the higher subscriber densities. Personal communications systems (PCS) is a new generation of mobile communication network, which is expected to support services like seamless coverage and service, personal mobility, voice/data capabilities, low cost by a single identity number and a pocketable communication terminal. The number of users of PCS network will be much higher than today's cellular users. Cells will be smaller and smaller in size to support this increasing number of users and traffic- actually to reuse the limited available radio spectrum.

Location Management is an essential component in wireless cellular networks for supporting mobility. As cells are getting smaller in size day by day, to support increasing number of users, this topic has already got the attention of the researchers. Lots of location-tracking schemes have been proposed for location update and terminal paging. We believe that a good location management approach should use the mobility history of individual users to dynamically create individualized location areas. In my thesis I have studied the existing update and paging schemes and implemented the LeZi-update scheme. LeZi-update is a path-based location-tracking and paging scheme that dynamically builds and maintains a dictionary of individual user's path updates. The update cost is reduced by variable-to-fixed length encoding of LZ algorithm, whereas the paging cost is reduced by its built-in prediction power.

People

• Abhishek Roy
• Amiya Bhattacharya