The Computer Science Colloquium

Amotz Bar-Noy
(Brooklyn College, CUNY)

"Cellular Networks: Where are the Mobile Users?"

Mobile are roaming in a cellular network. Unless they report their new location each time they cross boundaries of cells, the system must conduct a search operation to find their exact location. Reporting new locations by mobiles consumes expensive up-link communication lines. Therefore, in current and future cellular networks, at each point in time for any particular mobile, the system knows only a zone of cells containing the one cell which is the location of this mobile. For this zone, the system maintains a profile that predicts the exact location of the mobile by associating a probability with each cell in the zone. An efficient search should optimize usage of down-link communication lines and the time needed to find the mobile. This model gives rise to many optimization problems. This talk discusses some of them by presenting known results and open problems.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Netlogic, Inc.