Streamlined Paging for Recurrent Mobility Tracking

Human mobility is highly regular and recurrent by nature. The 93% potential predictability (Song et al. in Science, 327(5968):1018–1021, 2010) can be exploited to improve location tracking in mobile networks. Aimed at 5G lightweight connectivity, this paper concentrates on the problem of low paging cost efficiency and proposes two means to resolve it. First, a generic location management framework called cell masking is introduced to break the granularity of the tracking area down to the cell level. The tracking area can thus be streamlined in terms of both size and shape along the user trajectory. Second, context mapping is proposed to determine the streamlined paging cells in the cell-masked tracking area list. It does not incur extra location updates or paging latency. The simulation results reveal that the streamlined paging scheme has the advantages of high paging cost efficiency and high signaling space efficiency. At the cost of a minor increase in uplink signaling unit size, the reductions in uplink signaling count and downlink signaling volume reach 90% and 70%, respectively. Thus, the proposed mechanism is a superior candidate solution to the 3GPP open problem of signaling reduction to enable light connection in LTE (3GPP TSG RAN Meeting #71 RP-160540 2016).