In mobile communications networks, a location management scheme is responsible for tracking mobile users. Typically, a location management scheme consists of a location update scheme and a paging scheme. Gau and Haas first proposed the concurrent search(CS) approach that could simultaneously locate a number of mobile users in mobile communications networks. We propose to use the theory of the discrete-time Markov chain to analyze the performance of the concurrent search approach. In particular, we concentrate on the worst case in which each mobile user appears equally likely in all the cells of the network. We analyze the average paging delay, the call blocking probability and the system size. We show that our analytical results are consistent with the simulation results of the concurrent search.

In this paper, in order to reduce the location update cost in wireless mobile networks, we propose a cooperative location update scheme. The proposed scheme first discovers the statistical relation between mobile stations according to their history of location update and paging. In order to reduce the total cost of mobility management, we propose integrating the cooperative location update scheme with the concurrent search scheme. We use analytical results and simulation results to justify the usage of the proposed approach.

With the state-of-the-art IC technology, we can share a variety of digital content stored in our mobile devices via wireless communications. When requests for digital content arrive, base stations have to search for at least one copy of the digital content. We extend the concurrent search approach to efficiently location digital content. In addition, we propose the opportunistic concurrent search scheme in which a base station could use a single channel to page a number of mobile stations simultaneously. We use computer simulations to evaluate the performance and justify the usage of the proposed schemes.