A Cellular Mobile Telephone System is usually divided into service areas that are employed for different mobility management needs. For instance, sites in the system are grouped into location areas that are used to find mobiles and terminate incoming calls. In this way,the system only needs to track the movement of users when they cross from one service area to another. Still,since the tracking is done using radio bandwidth that is needed for telephone calls, it is important to carefully design the service areas to minimize the mobility management load.In this paper, we define the characteristics that are needed in the service areas for digital cellular systems and state the service area design problem as a graph partitioning optimization problem where the goal is to minimize the diameter of the resulting subgraphs. A heuristic technique is then proposed to design service areas in a systematic and efficient way. This technique achieves better utilization of system resources and produces service areas whose characteristics are close to optimal.
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