Abstract
In Long Term Evolution systems (LTE) the concept of Tracking Area List (TAL) is introduced. TAL consists of a group of Tracking Areas (TAs), and it is assigned to a User Equipment (UE), the UE does not need to register its location when it moves within TAs of the assigned TAL. If an optimum TAL design is implemented this may result in the reduction of total signaling overhead cost introduced by location update and paging procedures. One of the challenges of mobility management in cellular networks is the reduction of overall signaling overhead while maintaining acceptable performance. In this paper we propose a TAL design optimization for reducing overall signaling overhead algorithm. To achieve optimum TAL design a cell may change its current TAL, and this may cause a service interruption for active UEs in that cell. A budget constrain parameter is introduced to define the maximum number of cells change TALs while maintaining improved performance. For UE mobility modeling the data required can be obtain from the network management system which are cell load and handover statistical data. Markov model is used for UE mobility modeling. We present numerical results, from which we can say that the optimum TAL design returned from the proposed algorithm gave considerable reduction of overall signaling overhead cost compared to the traditional TA design.