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An efficient mobility management for mobile stations plays an important role in mobile communication networks. Two basic operations of mobility management are location registration and paging. A zone-based registration (ZBR) is implemented in most of the mobile communication networks and we consider the mobility management scheme that combines a zone-based registration and a selective paging (SP). We propose a new analytical model that can reflect the characteristics of the ZBR smoothly where location areas of the ZBR are set up so that regions such as roads, bridges, rivers and mountains, where there is relatively little traffic, will constitute their boundaries. We adopt a revised 2-dimensional random walk mobility model to consider such characteristics. In addition, we propose a more efficient division scheme of location area for 2-step selective paging. We evaluate the performance of the mobility management scheme using our mobility model to determine the optimal size of a location area that will result in the minimum signaling traffic on radio channels. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that our mobility model is useful to evaluate the ZBR more exactly. The results of this study can be used effectively in analyzing and comparing the performances of various mobility management schemes.

In this study, we consider zone-based registration (ZBR) in mobile communication networks. In ZBR, when a mobile moves to a new zone, it registers its zone to the network database to keep the mobile’s current zone, and to connect an incoming call to the mobile when it is generated. A mobile can store one zone, or more than one zones. Among various types of ZBR, we focus on two-zone-based registration (TZR), which is known to have good performance. In TZR, a mobile can store two zones that it has recently registered, and does not register when it crosses either zone that it has already kept. In general, in TZR, a mobile registers its zone less often than in single-zone-based registration (SZR). However, TZR increases the paging cost, because the network may not know the exact zone where the mobile is. Mathematical modeling and performance analysis are performed to obtain the exact performance of SZR and TZR, by considering the busy-line effect and implicit registration effect of outgoing calls from a mobile. From numerical results for various circumstances, it is shown that TZR is superior to SZR in most cases.