A dynamic location management service for group applications in cellular networks

Mobile telephony is rapidly evolving with new services, and one-to-many group applications, such as Push to Talk over Cellular services, are expected to be more prevalent in the near future. The core issue that needs to be addressed in order for such services to be practical on a large scale is efficiency. Cellular providers are virtualizing network functions to introduce services in an agile and cost effective manner. Location management is a key control task in cellular network operations. We propose and develop an efficient group location management scheme as a virtualized network function for group cellular applications. The performance improvement is mainly achieved by the virtualized and separate group management architecture and an efficient dynamic group profiling algorithm. We conduct theoretical analyses of our scheme for signaling cost and performance gains under diverse traffic conditions. Furthermore, we carry out extensive evaluations using both real traces and synthetic human mobility data, and we validate the efficiency of the proposed scheme in both location updates and paging.