zCap: a zero configuration adaptive paging and mobility management mechanism

摘要

Today, cellular networks rely on fixed collections of cells (tracking areas) for user equipment localisation.nLocating users within these areas involves broadcast search (paging), which consumes radio bandwidth butnreduces the user equipment signalling required for mobility management. Tracking areas are today manuallynconfigured, hard to adapt to local mobility and influence the load on several key resources in the network.nWe propose a decentralised and self-adaptive approach tomobility management based on a probabilistic modelnof local mobility. By estimating the parameters of this model from observations of user mobility collectednonline, we obtain a dynamic model from which we construct local neighbourhoods of cells where we are mostnlikely to locate user equipment. We propose to replace the static tracking areas of current systems withnneighbourhoods local to each cell. The model is also used to derive a multi-phase paging scheme, where thendivision of neighbourhood cells into consecutive phases balances response times and paging cost. The completenmechanism requires no manual tracking area configuration and performs localisation efficiently in terms ofnsignalling and response times. Detailed simulations show that significant potential gains in localisation efficiencynare possible while eliminating manual configuration of mobility management parameters. Variants ofnthe proposal can be implemented within current (LTE) standards. Copyright © 2013 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd.