Effect of cell residence time variance on the performance of an advanced paging algorithm

The use of advanced sequential paging algorithms has been suggested as a means to reduce the signaling cost in future mobile cellular networks. In a proposed algorithm (Koukoutsidis and Theologou, 2003), the system can use the additional information of the last interaction cell combined with a mobility model to predict the short-term location probabilities at the time of an incoming call arrival. The short-term location probabilities reduce the uncertainty in mobile user position and thus greatly improve the search. In this paper, an analytical model is derived that allows for a general distribution of cell residence times. By considering a Gamma distribution, we study the effect of the variance of cell residence times and derive useful results on the performance of the algorithm.