TECHNICAL PAPER Profile based location update for cellular network using mobile phone data Smita Parija 1 • Swati Swayamsiddha 2 • Prasanna Kumar Sahu 1 • Sudhansu Sekhar Singh 2 Received: 15 February 2017 / Accepted: 21 February 2019 / Published online: 1 March 2019 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract In the wireless cellular network, location management is one of the intricate dynamic issues that expend the available limited wireless resources in order to guarantee for delivering a call to the mobile device. Towards enhancing the Quality of Service and reducing the dilemma of location management, an improved location update scheme has been proposed in this paper to capture the daily behavioral pattern of the mobile users. Here a profile based LU scheme has been developed according to the mobility pattern of the individual users in a cellular network. Especially, mobile phone data is recorded in a Call Data Record (CDR) data base containing the spatial–temporal information of the millions of anonymized users for consecutive 2 months. In this paper, the proposed profile based LU technique takes into consideration of the individual user movement to optimize the location update characteristics in order to minimize the signaling cost of mobile network. The proposed algorithm shows an improvement of 17% in terms of bandwidth compared to the conventional technique. The use of CDR data for profiling the users, the mathematical formulation which has not yet been used by the other researchers and validation of the algorithm based on actual user data rather than theoretically predicted data are the novelty of this work. 1 Introduction In this era of smart applications, the rapid advancement of mobile technology has improved the style of living. Specifically, confining the focus cellular wireless commu- nications, mobile phones not only serve as a means to communicate but has become an inevitable part of human being (Toril et al. 2009). The next generation wireless technology has improved the mobile communication with respect to reliability, quality of service (QoS), data rate, latency, affordability and various new features offered to the users (Hsiao and Chen 2015). The rapid proliferation of mobile users has led to scarcity of network resources in terms of bandwidth and signaling cost, specifically in locating the mobile users in the network. The location update is one of the critical issues that enables the ubiq- uitous communication in the location management and is perceived to provide standard QoS even under very harsh and unexpected conditions. Location management is an important and complex issue faced by urban planners for reducing the signaling and spectrum utilization in the wireless networks (Roy et al. 2007). It is the process of tracking the current location of the subscriber (location update) and intimating the user about the incoming call (paging). These signaling pro- cesses requires huge bandwidth. The use of Call Data Record (CDR) to profile the users is the novelty of this work. The actual user data is used for the implementation of the algorithm rather than using theoretically predicted data (Bonchi et al. 2011). Since the optimization is per- formed at individual user level, the extent of optimization is comparatively more than other algorithms. The final output shows promising results, especially regarding bandwidth conservation. The paper is organized as follows: the next section presents the review of location management techniques. Section 3 briefly explains the proposed model based on & Smita Parija smita.parija@gmail.com Swati Swayamsiddha swayamsiddhafet@kiit.ac.in Prasanna Kumar Sahu pksahu@nitrkl.ac.in Sudhansu Sekhar Singh ssinghfet@kiit.ac.in 1 NIT Rourkela, Rourkela, India 2 School of Electronics Engineering, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India 123 Microsystem Technologies (2021) 27:369–377 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-019-04367-6