TAC Reconfiguration for Paging Optimization in LTE-Based Mobile Communication Systems

In LTE-based mobile communication systems, a Tracking Area Code (TAC) is defined by a group of cells for paging operation. The existing TAC configuration has been made manually by considering only the geographical location of cells, and thus it tends to induce an imbalanced TAC configuration and a low paging success rate. In this paper, we propose a reconfiguration of the existing TAC configurations to get a more balanced TAC configuration and to increase the paging success rate. The proposed TAC reconfiguration scheme is designed by considering the mobility (handover) ratio of mobile users between cells as well as the number of users in cells. From the performance analysis with real traffic data of SK Telecom in Korea, we see that the proposed scheme can provide more balanced TAC configurations and also improve the paging success rates by 8%, compared to the existing TAC configurations.