Modeling of handover counting and location management for wireless mobile networks

Handover (or handoff) management is the set of actions that allows a wireless network to maintain a mobile user's connection as it moves through different cells during a call. The handover is typically done during a cell boundary crossing and all of the mobile terminal's connection information must be transferred into the new cell (or new base station). So, it is important to count the number of handovers made by a user during a call for proper network resources dimensioning and performance prediction. Location management is the set of actions aimed to find the current location of an inactive mobile user for call delivery. It implies the transmission of signaling messages for dynamic databases updates, paging, and so on. This problem is formulated in terms of cost optimization and it is mathematically related to handover counting. In this paper, we summarize many of the proposed model to deal with these problems, and we will be mainly focussed on the renewal process approach.