The Peril of Evaluating Location Management Proposals through Simulations

The challenge of supporting rapidly growing numbers of mobile users, while constrained by limited radio spectrum, is being faced by cellular network operators worldwide. Several location management schemes have been proposed to improve the performance of such networks, but a fair assessment and comparison of their performance is difficult without an accurate mobility model. The performance of location management schemes depends considerably on subscriber mobility patterns. Some of the recent methods proposed in the literature are reviewed and selected that concentrate on the location updating and paging overhead. To analyze the performance of the selected proposals, two mobility models, namely activity-based mobility model and random mobility model, were used. From the results it is clear that the mobility model has a significant impact and the results described in various proposals using a random mobility model may not reflect the relative performance when deploying schemes in actual systems.