Abstract
In a mobile telecommunications network, the location area (LA) of a mobile station (MS) is tracked by an LA update (LAU) mechanism. To reduce the LAU traffic caused by the ping-pong effect, the overlapping LA concept is introduced. In the overlapping LA configuration, an LA selection policy is required to select the new LA at an LAU when the MS enters a new cell covered by multiple LAs. This paper describes four LA selection policies and proposes an analytic model to study the performance of these LA selection policies. Our study provides guidelines to determine an appropriate degree of overlapping among the LAs. © 2008 IEEE.