Design of location areas with QoS considerations in a cellular network

In this paper, we present a location area (LA) planning model which explicitly has more QoS-conscious constraints than any other models. In order to specify an acceptable level of QoS, paging delay time (PDT) and paging blocking rate (PBR) are introduced. The paging process is described by the M/M/c/K queuing system and queuing analysis is carried out to obtain PDT and PBR. Also, in the proposed model, the time-varying call arrival rates are used to define the paging load on each cell, which helps to reflect the pattern of incoming calls more precisely and subsequently to improve the QoS level. To evaluate the proposed model, some examples are solved along with the average rate model and the peak rate model. The results show that the proposed model has the capability to maintain the acceptable level of QoS with the reasonable location management cost, compared to other models. Also, the sensitivity analysis is performed to see the effect of PDT and PBR in the formulation and it turns out that both PBR and PDT are important elements of the QoS measure and influential to the location management cost.