In order to provide efficient communication services to mobile stations (MSs), location management should be supported, which consists of location registration and paging for call delivery. Location management generates a lot of signaling messages at radio interface and thus, consumes scarce radio resources. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient location management scheme to reduce the number of signaling messages due to location management. Since MSs riding on a transportation system (TS) generates significant location registration signaling loads at the boundary of a registration area (RA), group location management has been proposed to reduce the location registration signaling load of MSs riding on a TS. Since the conventional group location management scheme has been proposed only for single network with single interface MS, a group location management scheme for multi interface MS in multi tier networks is proposed in this paper, where multi tier MSs are widely used with the popularity of smart phone. In the proposed scheme, the location of multi interface MSs riding on a TS is not managed individually by the riding MSs themselves but managed collectively by a TS. The performance of the proposed multi tier group location management scheme is analyzed and compared with that of conventional multi tier location management. The results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce signaling load at radio interface.
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