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An alternative strategy (AS) for location management has been proposed for improvingthe classical strategy (CS) for location management used in GSM. It significantlyreduces the location update signaling traffic on the radio link by increasing theresponsibility of the fixed network. The AS stores the mobile related informationand brings great savings in system resources when a mobile host (MH) has a highpredictable mobility pattern. However, the AS is only suitable for long term eventsand fixed movement tracks. It's location tracking will cost more when the MH changesits movement habit or encounters some short term events. In this paper, we proposea novel method which aims at reduction of signaling overhead resulting from locationtracking in the above situations. The key idea is taking the recent user movementinformation (i.e., last connection's location area and start time of the lastconnection), that is called paging information record, into account to determinewhich location area to be paged first. Performance analysis has been conducted usinga city area zone model which can model a realistic city area environment. Experimentalresults show that our method can reduce 14\% - 55\% and 6\% - 39\% location management's signaling cost compared with the CS and AS, respectively. Besidesmaintaining low location update cost as that of AS, our intelligent location trackingstrategy achieves a significant reduction in location tracking cost than the AS. Theoverhead of our approach is the additional storage space required (for storing MHprofiles and paging information records) in network databases and the additionalprocessing time of profiles and paging information records. However, neither the storage nor the processing time requirements can be considered significant in termsof today's memory capacity and processor speed as far as the reduction of signalingtraffic implying more bandwidth available.
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