Location management is one of the most important issues in mobile comp
uting. Location management consists of location updates, searches and
search-updates. An update occurs when a mobile host changes location.
A search occurs when a host wants to communicate with a mobile host wh
ose location is unknown to the requesting host. A search-update occurs
after a successful search, when the location information correspondin
g to the searched host is updated at some hosts. Various strategies ca
n be designed for search, update and search-update. Static location ma
nagement uses one fixed combination of search, update and search-updat
e strategies. Simulations were carried out to evaluate the performance
of different static location management strategies for various call-m
obility patterns. It was noticed that performing search-updates signif
icantly reduced the search costs without significantly increasing the
cost of updates (upon moves and searches). To obtain good performance
using static location management, the system designer should a priori
have a fair idea of the call-mobility pattern of the users. Having thi
s information, the system designer can select the combination which pe
rforms best for the given call-mobility pattern. The host behavior (ca
ll frequency, mobility) is not always available to the system designer
. Thus, there is a need for adaptive location management. In this pape
r we present a scheme for adaptive location management. The basic assu
mption behind adaptive location management is that the past history of
the system will reflect the behavior in the future. The adaptive sche
me dynamically estimates the future host behavior with the help of the
past call-mobility patterns. Results indicate that the adaptive schem
e performs better than the static scheme for a wide range of call-mobi
lity patterns.