Concurrently searching for mobile users in cellular networks

In today's systems, upon arrival of calls to mobile users, the system attempts to locate the users sequentially (one by one) through a paging operation. In this letter, we propose to concurrently search for a number of mobile users in a mobile network, significantly reducing the cost of locating mobile users. The reduction in the paging costs due to such a concurrent search can be quite substantial, depending on the knowledge of the probabilities of the users' locations, the number of cells in the network, and the number of mobiles to be located. Additionally, we propose a low-complexity heuristic that reduces the average paging cost by 25%, in the case of no knowledge of probabilities of the mobiles' locations. With such knowledge, further reduction in the average paging costs of up to 90% can be achieved.