Efficient tracking area management framework for 5G networks

One important objective of 5G mobile networks is to accommodate a diverse and ever-increasing number of user equipment (UEs). Coping with the massive signaling overhead expected from UEs is an important hurdle to tackle so as to achieve this objective. In this paper, we devise an efficient tracking area list management (ETAM) framework that aims for finding optimal distributions of tracking areas (TAs) in the form of TA lists (TALs) and assigning them to UEs, with the objective of minimizing two conflicting metrics, namely paging overhead and tracking area update (TAU) overhead. ETAM incorporates two parts (online and offline) to achieve its design goal. In the online part, two strategies are proposed to assign in real time, TALs to different UEs, while in the offline part, three solutions are proposed to optimally organize TAs into TALs. The performance of ETAM is evaluated via analysis and simulations, and the obtained results demonstrate its feasibility and ability in achieving its design goals, improving the network performance by minimizing the cost associated with paging and TAU.