A simulated annealing based solution approach for the two-layered location registration and paging areas partitioning problem in cellular mobile networks

This paper presents a mathematical model and simulated annealing based solution approach for finding optimal location updates and paging area configuration for mobile communication networks. We use a two-layered zone-based location registration and paging scheme in which the costs of location updates and paging signaling traffic are reduced by introducing a two-step paging process. The location updates and paging procedures in a two-layered scheme are first described, and an approximation of the measure required for calculating the paging-related signaling volume is provided based on assumptions of cell shapes and mobile stations’ movement patterns. A simulated annealing (SA)-based solution method is devised along with a greedy heuristic, and computational experiments are conducted to illustrate the superiority of the proposed SA-based method over other solution methods.