Publication

Abstract : In a mobile wireless cellular network the size of a location area (LA) could vary from one single cell to the entire service area under a Mobile Switching Center. These two situations depict two extreme possibilities. For the first case paging cost would be minimal whereas location update (LU) cost will be significantly high. For the latter possibility, the situation will just be the reverse. This work addresses the problem of designing an optimum LA within available spectrum such that total network cost, comprising of LU cost and cost for paging, can be minimized by resolving the inherent trade-off between these two cost components. We have formulated a constrained cost optimization problem to find out the optimal LA size. Since the optimization problem is combinatorial in nature, as solution methodologies we have presented two heuristics, based on Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithm. The quality of the solutions obtained proves that in near future these two evolutionary methods will be strong contenders for solving NP-Hard problems.