The peril of evaluating location management proposals through simulations

The challenge of supporting rapidly growing numbers of mobile users, while constrained by limited radio spectrum, is being faced by cellular network o perators worldwide. Several location management schemes have been proposed to improve the performance of such networks, but a fair assessment and comp arison of their performance is difficult without an accurate mobility model . The performance of location management schemes depends considerably on su bscriber mobility patterns, Some of the recent methods proposed in the lite rature are reviewed and selected that concentrate on the location updating and paging overhead. To analyze the performance of the selected proposals, two mobility models, namely activity-based mobility model and random mobili ty model, were used. From the results it is clear that the mobility model h as a significant impact and the results described in various proposals usin g a random mobility model may not reflect the relative performance when dep loying schemes in actual systems.