Dynamic SON-Enabled Location Management in LTE Networks

Wireless networks are facing various challenges that demand continuous and rapid improvement. Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is a preferred wireless technology because of its satisfactory performance. Owing to an exponential increase in demand and new potential applications, the core network of LTE, which is known as the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), is affected by a surge in signaling caused by a variety of control functions. The signaling overhead decreases the users' Quality of Experience (QoE). The current study attempts to improve the intelligence of location management techniques. As an extension of our previous study [1], a Self-Organizing Network (SON) that enables dynamic reconfiguration of cell-to-TAL/MME is introduced. Both centralized and distributed pooling schemes are tested in terms of signaling overhead and user power consumption. A decomposition model that reduces the original formulated problem to two sub-problems is proposed, each of which is solved optimally. In addition, a smart cell-to-TAL selection scheme is proposed to prioritize potential cells that might be visited by a user equipment (UE). Our method is shown to outperform several state-of-the-art methods presented in the literature. Finally, a heuristic algorithm is presented to obtain a less complex solution than the optimal one.