Location management in mobile network: A survey

•Different types of location management schemes for mobile network are discussed.•The location management cost in terms of message is calculated for these schemes.•Comparative analysis is performed between the methods based on cost.•Future scopes of location management are also explored.

Location management is an important area of mobile computing. Location management in mobile network deals with location registration and tracking of mobile terminals. The location registration process is called location update and the searching process is called paging. Various types of location management methods exist such as mobility based location management, data replication based location management, signal attenuation based location tracking, time, zone and distance based location update etc. In this paper, existing location management schemes are discussed and compared with respect to their cost consumption in terms of bytes. Finally the key issues are addressed in the context of location management for future generation mobile network.