Handoff Delay Optimization Using Hybrid Prediction Model Regitha M R 1 Dr.Varghese Paul 2 Shailesh Sivan 3 Nijo Antony 4 1 Department of Computer Science, Sacred Heart College (Autonomous), Thevara, Kochi-682013, Kerala, India E-mail: regitha.baiju@gmail.com 2 Department of Iformation Technology, CUSAT, Thrikkakara, Kochi-682021, Kerala, India E-mail: vp.it.cusat@gmail.com 3 Department of Computer Science, Sacred Heart College (Autonomous) Thevara, Kochi-682013, Kerala, India E-mail: shaileshsivan@gmail.com 4 Department of Computer Science, Sacred Heart College (Autonomous) Thevara, Kochi-682013, Kerala, India E-mail: nijocmi@gmail.com 1. Introduction In cellular network, a geographical area is divided into cells that are aggregated into groups called Lo- cation area (LA). For delivering services to a user, all the cells in an LA covering the user will be paged to establish the radio link connection. Within the LA, frequencies used in one LA can be used in an- other LA. Arrangement of large number of cells per LA reduces interference to the system [4]. Each cell has its own cellular tower called base station (BS). Several base stations are under the control of a Base Station Controller (BSC) that comes under a mobile switching center (MSC) [2]. Each MSC belongs to a data base called visitor location register (VLR). VLR assigns a temporary mobile subscriber identity to every mobile station (MS) in the area and hence it has to be updated each time when the MS travels from one cell to another. 1.1. Cellular Network Architecture As indicated in Fig. 1, in cellular networks, the sys- tem keeps track of the location of an MS through an up-to-date profile of it stored in various databases namely VLR and Home Location Register (HLR). An MS profile consists not only of its current loca- tion information, but also service information, such as billing and authentication. The tremendous usage of smart phones and elec- tronic tablets has increased the explosive growth of multimedia wireless services. To improve the network performance, an efficient location manage- ment is essential. Location management handles and keeps track of an active MS within the cellular net- work. Since while making a call, the exact location of an MS has be known to the network, the location management usually tracks an active MS between two consecutive phone calls [3]. 99 Copyright © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ International Journal of Networked and Distributed Computing, Vol. 6, No. 2 (April 2018) 99-107