Abstract

Mobile communication systems are increasingly adopting Internet Protocol solutions for mobility management. Taking into account that an increasing number of mobile devices communicate actively for only a fraction of the time, location tracking costs must be appropriate for active and idle devices. Compelling all devices to maintain detailed location information in the network causes unnecessary signaling overhead and mobile battery drainage. Contemporary cellular mobile communication systems deploy technology-specific paging, which supports the maintenance of a mobile terminal’s coarse location information and to request its exact location when a call comes in. IP paging goes beyond that by targeting heterogeneous access in IP-based mobile communication networks, and by contributing towards meeting IP mobility management requirements on the scalability of future systems. This paper describes a generic IP paging architecture and protocol for heterogeneous mobile communication systems that integrates modularly into various IP-based mobility protocols. At the same time efficient integration of various access technologies and associated utilization of technology specific power save mechanisms is supported. The concept facilitates flexible paging area design and the deployment of enhanced paging strategies aimed at optimizing overall signaling costs. The concept is analyzed with regard to its characteristics to save signaling costs and compared with a different paging concept (P-MIP). Design and associated performance characteristics are evaluated based on the topological structure of a domain’s access network. To enhance power saving efficiency in Wireless-LAN-enabled networks, the integration of the IEEE802.11 access technology with the proposed paging protocol including the efficient utilization of the standard’s Power Save Mode is described. The complete paging system’s delay characteristics are evaluated analytically to estimate dependencies of the session blocking probability on the network’s link delay and IEEE802.11 specific power saving parameter settings.

Keywords: Internet Protocol; Mobile communication; Paging; Heterogeneous access; Power save mode

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Design goals and requirements

3. Related work

4. IP paging––architecture and protocol

4.1. The IP paging architecture

4.2. Protocol operation

4.3. Discussion of characteristics

5. Signaling cost analysis

6. Integration of the IEEE802.11 power save mode

6.1. The standard IEEE802.11 power save mode

6.2. Limitation of utilizing standard IEEE802.11 PSM

6.3. Extension for network controlled IEEE802.11 PSM

6.4. View of an integrated system

6.5. Room for optimization in saving mobile energy

7. Evaluation of delay characteristics

7.1. Model to determine the paging delay

7.2. Analytical evaluation of the call blocking probability

8. Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Vitae