To reduce the signaling cost of paging in mobile communication, sequential paging schemes are proposed by partitioning a location area into several paging areas such that each area is paged sequentially. Necessary conditions for the optimal partition of cells with delay bound are examined by considering the mobiles location probability at each cell. The Optimal Cell Partitioning (OCP) is proposed based on the necessary conditions and the fathoming rule which trims off the unnecessary solution space and expedite the search process. Two Heuristics, BSG and BNC are also presented to further increase the computational efficiency in real-world paging scheme for the next generation mobile systems.
The effectiveness of the proposed paging schemes is illustrated with computational results. The Heuristic BSG that performs the search in the most promising solution group outperforms the best existing procedure with the 6-69% gain in paging cost in problems with 100 cells.