Telecommun Syst DOI 10.1007/s11235-013-9767-1 Reducing overhead in movement based dynamic location management scheme for cellular networks Vijendra Singh Bhadauria · Sanjeev Sharma · Ravindra Patel © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract One of the key issues in cellular mobile commu- nication is to find the current location of mobile terminal (MT) to deliver the services, which is called location man- agement (LM). Much research has been done on dynamic LM that reduced the LM cost up to a large extent. In move- ment based dynamic LM scheme, the location area is defined in the form of ring of cells for individual user. Whenever an MT visits a cell outside of its current location area (LA), it triggers location update (LU). For this purpose, network must inform the mobile terminal about ID of all the cells present in its current location area. In this paper, a simple way of cell-ID assignment is proposed under which, net- work sends only the ID of center cell of LA ring to MT and then MT can compute IDs of all other cells in its location area. This saves a significant amount of wireless bandwidth by minimizing the signaling traffic at VLR level and thus reduces the mobility management overhead. Keywords Mobile terminal · Cellular mobile network · Dynamic location management · Location area · Movement based scheme V. Singh Bhadauria (B ) Computer Science and Engineering Department, Technocrats Institute of Technology and Science, Bhopal, MP, India e-mail: mic_cs_bpl@yahoo.com S. Sharma School of Information Technology, University Institute of Technology Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya, Bhopal, MP, India e-mail: sanjeev@rgtu.net R. Patel Department of Computer Applications, University Institute of Technology Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya, Bhopal, MP, India e-mail: ravindra@rgtu.net 1 Introduction Cellular mobile communication enables MTs (subscribed mobile users) to communicate with each other independent of their locations. Mobile networks are often called “cellu- lar” because of the use of base stations covering by a radio signal a specific geographic area called “cell” [5]. The basic architecture of such networks is shown in Fig. 1, the ser- vice area is divided into location areas (LAs) and the LA is divided into cells. In each cell, there is a base station (BS) that communicates with MTs over pre-assigned radio fre- quencies. Groups of several cells are connected to a mobile switching center (MSC) through which, the calls are routed to telephone networks. MSC is a telephone exchange specially assembled for mobile applications. It interfaces between mobile phones (via BS) and the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Home Location Register (HLR) and the Visitor Location Register (VLR) are the databases used for location man- agement (LM) in mobile networks [1]. The HLR contains permanent data like directory number, profile information, current location, and validation period of the MTs whose primary subscription is within its service area. A copy of user profile is always transferred from HLR to the current VLR [17] and for each MT, HLR contains a pointer to a VLR to assist routing incoming calls [11]. A VLR is asso- ciated with each MSC that contains temporary record for all MTs currently active within the LA of the MSC. VLR retrieves the information for handling calls to or from a vis- iting MT. To facilitate the tracking of a moving MT, network is partitioned into many location areas (LAs) [6, 7, 12]. Each LA may include tens or hundreds of cells depending upon the location management scheme used. Each LA is served