Location Database Clustering to Achieve Location
Management Time Cost Reduction in A Mobile
Computing System
Chen Jixiong, Li Guohui, Xu Huajie, Cai Xia*, Yang Bing
School of Computer Science & Technology, Huazhong University of Science & Technology
Department of Computer Science, Huazhong Normal University*
Wuhan, P.R.China, 430074
Abstract-An important issue in the design of a mobile
computing system is how to manage the location information of
mobile clients. In the existing commercial cellular mobile
computing systems, a two-tier architecture is adopted.
However, the two-tier architecture is not scalable. In the
literatures, a hierarchical database structure is proposed in
which the location information of mobile clients within a cell is
managed by the location database responsible for the cell. The
location databases of different cells are organized into a
tree-like structure to facilitate the search of mobile clients. This
architecture can distribute the workload amongst the location
databases in the system. The location database organization
has much impact on the total location management cost.
However, non of previous work touches upon this problem. In
this paper, considering the mobility patterns of mobile clients
in different cells, we give a heuristic algorithm to cluster the
location databases with the objective to reduce the location
management cost. Extensive experiments are designed to
evaluate the performance. The comparison shows that our
location database clustering method can result in location
update cost reduction.
Index Terms- Mobile computing system, location
management time cost, location database, location database
clustering, set cover
I. INTRODUCTION
One of the most important issues in the design of the
mobile computing systems is the location management of
mobile clients [1, 2, 3, 4]. This is not only essential for
providing efficient mobile communication services among
mobile clients but also important to many new mobile
computing applications, such as systems to support location
dependent queries [5].
In the existing cellular mobile networks, a two-tier
location database architecture is adopted to manage the
locations of mobile clients [6]. This two-tier architecture is
simple and easy to implement. However, it has two serious
performance problems, which makes it unsuitable for many
new mobile computing applications. Firstly, the number of
mobile clients in a mobile computing system can be very
large, and the system may need to maintain a large amount of
location information for its mobile clients. It is obvious that
the two-tier architecture is not scalable. Secondly, because a
mobile client is permanently associated with a Home
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Location Register (HLR), the overheads for maintaining the
locations of mobile clients can be very heavy if the mobility
of clients is high. It is obvious that the cost for locating a
mobile client greatly depends on the locations of the calling
mobile client and the called mobile client. If a called mobile
client is far away from its HLR, the cost for locating the
mobile client could be very expensive.
In order to improve the system performance and to reduce
the total cost for locating a mobile client, various strategies
have been proposed. One of the efficient methods is to
organize the location databases in a hierarchical structure [1,
7]. Although the hierarchical structure of the location
databases can improve the performance of searching for
mobile clients, the total location update overheads for
maintaining the locations of mobile clients can also be
heavy. In the organization of the hierarchical databases, it is
important to consider the update cost as well as the
movements of mobile clients, i.e., the mobility patterns.
Since in the system, different mobile clients can have very
different mobility patterns, the location database
organization has much impact on the location management
cost. However, to our best knowledge, it still lacks any
detailed study on the relationship between the location
database organization and the location management cost.
In this paper, we study the location database (LDB)
organization problem in hierarchical databases for mobile
computing systems over cellular networks. Our objective is
to design a nearly-ideal location database topology structure
to achieve the location management cost reduction. It is
NP-hard to design an ideal LDB topology structure. In this
paper, we give a heuristic algorithm to design a nearly ideal
topology structure for the LDB organization based on the set
covering theory.
The remaining parts of this paper are organized as follows.
Section II defines the system model. Section III proposes the
basic definitions applied in the paper. Section IV presents a
heuristic LDB organization method based on the set
covering theory. Section V includes the performance
evaluation of the algorithm and section VI is the conclusion.
II. CELLUAR MOBILE NETWORK AND LOCATION
DATABASES MODEL
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 A cellular mobile network is based on the concept of
frequency reuse. The whole service area is divided into a
number of connected cells with a base supporting station
(BSS) in each cell. The limited wireless bandwidth is
partitioned into channels. The mobile clients within a cell
communicate with the BSS of the cell through a wireless
channel.
Each BSS maintains a location database. The location
databases of different neighboring BSS’s are organized into a
hierarchical tree structure, as shown in Figure 1. Note that in
an existing GSM mobile network, the location databases are
managed by mobile switching centers. There are a large
number of mobile clients in the system. They may make a
call or submit a query on the locations of other mobile
clients. It is assumed that different mobile clients can have
different mobility patterns.
Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 3 Cell 4 Cell 5 Cell 6 Cell 7
Figure 1． Hierarchical databases to store the mobile clients’ locations
III. PRINCIPLES AND DEFINITIONS
A. Terminology
Since the location databases are organized into a tree like
structure, we define the least common ancestor of (leaf)
location databases DBi and DBj as LCA(DBi, DBj). The
height of LCA(DBi, DBj) to the leaf nodes of the tree is
denoted as lca(DBi, DBj). (We assume that all of the leaf
nodes of the location databases are at the same level in the
hierarchical location database tree). Let the leaf location
database responsible for the cell i be LDB(i).
Definition 1: The distance between cells i and j, termed as
dis(i, j), is defined as the height of the least common ancestor
of the responsible leaf the location databases, that is
dis(i,j) = lca(LDB(i),LDB(j))
If i = j then dis(i, j) = 0.
Let cur_cell(x) be the cell in which mobile client x is now
residing.
Definition 2: The distance between mobile clients x and y,
termed dis(x, y), is defined as the distance of the two cells in
which x and y is now residing, namely dis(x, y) =
dis(cur_cell(x), cur_cell(y)).
The above definition captures the locality of two mobile
clients. It can be seen easily that a mobile client takes a
smaller cost to find the location information of another
mobile client if the distance between them is smaller[1].
When calculating the location management cost, as in
[1,2], we consider the following related time costs in location
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update and the lookup procedure:
tL: The time cost of following a link in the tree of the
location databases, i.e., sending a message to the parent or
the child node of a location database;
tU: The time cost of a database update;
tQ: The time cost of a database query;
B. Problem
When a mobile client crosses the boundary between two
cells and moves from its formerly residing cell,
old_cell(x) ,into the currently residing cell, cur_cell(x), the
total location update cost is:
Update_cost=2dis(old_cell(x), cur_cell(x)) × tL +
(2dis(old_cell(x), cur_cell(x))+1) ×tU eqn. (1)
As can be seen from the above equation, the location
update time cost is proportional to the distance between the
starting and destination cells of a mobile client. However, the
distance between two cells in a location database hierarchical
tree is not necessarily the same under different LDB
topological structure. The hierarchical structure of the
location databases can have a significant impact on the
location management cost. Before constructing the location
database tree, we should consider the mobility patterns of all
the mobile clients to optimize the total location management
cost.
Cell 8 Cell 9
Cell 2
Cell 1 Cell 3
Cell 4
Cell 5 Cell 7
Cell 6
Cell 8 Cell 9
Figure 2. A mobile computing system consisting of 9 cells
Let us consider a more detailed example to illustrate the
problem. Suppose in the systems, there are 9 cells as in
Figure 2 and the 9 location databases responsible for the 9
cells are organized as in Figure 1. During a time period, there
are 200 times of border-crossings between Cell 3 and Cell 4,
and 50 times of border-crossings between Cell 2 and Cell 3.
According to Equation (1), the total time cost to update the
200 times of border-crossings between the Cell 3 and Cell 4
is:
200 × (2 × dis × tL + 2 × dis × tU + tU) = 200 × (2 × 2 × tL
+ 2 × 2 × tU + tU) = 800tL + 1000tU
where dis is the distance (see Definition 1) between the
two leaf location databases responsible for Cell 3 and Cell 4,
namely 2.
The location update time cost to update the 50 times of
1329
 border-crossings between Cell 2 and Cell 3 is: 100tL +150tU
Therefore, the total location update time cost
900tL+1150tU.
If we reorganize the location databases by switching the
positions of DB5 and DB7 with each other in the hierarchical
tree, the total time cost to update the 200 times of
border-crossings between Cell 3 and Cell 4 becomes:
200 × (2 × dis × tL + 2 × dis × tU + tU) = 200 × (2 × 1 × tL
+ 2 × 1 × tU + tU) = 400tL + 600tU
The total time cost to update the 50 times of
border-crossings between Cell 2 and Cell3 becomes:
50 × (2 × dis × tL + 2 × dis × tU + tU) = 50 × (2 × 2 × tL +
2 × 2 × tU + tU) = 200tL + 250tU
The total location update time cost in the reorganized case
will be 600tL+850tU and the location update time saving is
300tL+300tU. So the LDB topology structure has a great
impact on the location management cost.
IV. LOCATION DATABASE ORAGINZATION
Before the LDB organization, we construct a mobility
matrix, M, in which Mij is the number of boundary crossings
between the cell i and cell j during a time period. Table 1 is
an example mobility matrix.
TABLE I
algorithms are given to get the nearly ideal result.
is In the following, the problem of location database
structuring is transformed to the problem of getting a
non-overlapping cover of the set of location databases (the
associated cost is explained later) where (1) Set S is the set of
leaf location databases in the system; (2) The objective
function is the total location update time cost in the given
location database topological structure.
To get a location database organization with a nearly ideal
location update time cost, a set of sets is constructed as
follows:
（1） For ∀i, 1≤i≤n, Si={Cell i}
（2） For each Cell j, if the number of
border-crossings between Cell i and Cell j (denoted
as Mij) is larger than 0, then Si = Si ∪ {Cell j}
Obviously, S1, S2, …, Sn is a cover (with overlapping) of
the set S={Cell 1, Cell 2,…., Cell n}. Here n is the total
number of cells in the system. Based on this cover of S, we
get a non-overlapping cover of S. Note that here the cost with
the set covering of the n leaf location databases
corresponding to the n cells in the systems is the total number
of boundary crossing between two cells in two different sets.
That is
num-crossing=

| ∃p, q, p ≠ q, Cell i ∈ S ' ∧ Cell j ∈ S q'

AN EXAMPLE OF MOBILITY MATRIX

C1
C1 C2
100
C3
0
C4
30
C5
25
C6
0
C7
0
C8
0
C9
0
∑M ij
p
C2 100 80 40 20 30 0 0 0
C3 0 80 0 10 30 0 0 0
C4 30 40 0 120 0 80 25 0 S' S'
C5 25 20 10 120 15 160 30 50 Where p and q are two different set in a covering of
C6 0 30 30 0 15 0 100 60 the set of the n cells. After the construction of the above
C7 0 0 0 80 160 0 40 0 objective function, we give a heuristic algorithm to get a
C8 0 0 0 25 30 100 40 75
C9 0 0 0 0 50 60 0 75
nearly-ideal covering of the set of n cells ( leaf location
In the following sections, we give a set-covering databases corresponding to the n cells) with the objective to
algorithm to organize the location databases with the get the minimal value of num-crossing.
objective to minimize the total location management time Then each component (a leaf location database set which
cost. is composed of d(explained later) location databases) of the
cover forms a cluster. The following is the procedure to get
Definition 3 A set of sets S1, S2,…, Sn is called a cover of a the non-overlapping cover. In the following section, the
n number of elements in a set S is denoted as |S|. d is the
set S if and only if S = ∪ Si number of sub-location databases in the hierarchical tree. In
i =1 figure1, d is 3.
Definition 4 A set of sets S1, S2,…, Sn is called a PROCEDURE LDB-structuring
non-overlapping cover of a set S if and only if INPUT: Mij, S1, S2, …., Sn
n OUTPUT: A topology structure for the location
(1) S = ∪ Si database tree
i =1
setid=1;
(2) ∀i, j ,1 ≤ i, j ≤ n, i ≠ j , Si ∩ Sj = φ
In general, a (non-overlapping) cover of a set is associated
REPEAT UNTIL ∪S =φ
i
i

with a cost and we try to find an algorithm to get a cover of a

set with the minimum cost. Actually, to find a {
(non-overlapping) cover of a set with the optimal cost is
NP-hard [8]. Under different circumstances, heuristic

0-7803-9335-X/05/$20.00 ©2005 IEEE 1330

 (1) Suppose that the Mij is maximal value in the set reduce the location update cost, first we give an algorithm
{Mab|∃r,s, 1≤r,s≤n, (Cell a ∈Sr∧Cell b∈Ss)} under which the location databases are connected with their
(2)
'
S setid ={Cell i, Cell j} randomly chosen neighboring location databases (We call
this method Randomly Clustering: RC). Then we design
(3) Delete Cell i/Cell j from any Sk (1≤k≤n) which simulation experiments and compare the performance of the
includes Cell i/Cell j algorithm with that of the algorithm proposed in this paper
'
(4) WHILE | S setid |<d DO (Clustering based on Set Covering: CSC).
{ In the simulation experiment, there are 6561(=38) cells
(corresponding to 6561 leaf location databases) in the system
1 Compose the temporary set TS as follows:TS=φ;
and all the location databases are organized into a
2 For ∀Cell p in the system hierarchical tree. There are 100,000 mobile clients scattering
in the 6561 cells randomly. In the location database tree,
'
If (∃k, 1≤k≤n (Cell p∈Sk))∧ (Cell p∉ S setid )∧ each inner location database has 3 sub-location databases
' and the depth of the location database tree is 8. In other
(∃Cell q∈ S setid (Mpq>0)) words, the maximal distance between any two leaf location
databases is 8. The number of boundary-crossings per time
TS= TS ∪ {Cell p} unit for all the mobile clients follow a normal distribution.
We argue that even if in a real application, the number of
IF TS≠φ
boundary-crossings for mobile clients may not follow a
{ normal distribution, these experiments can show that we can
achieve the total location management cost reduction by
3 For ∀Cell m in TS, according to the following
structuring the location databases deliberately.
equation, calculate total-numm where
As can be seen from Equation (1), the location update cost
total-numm= ∑ Mim | Cell i ∈ S setid
'
is proportional to the distance between two leaf location
i databases responsible for the corresponding two cells. In the
4 Select the Cell x from TS with the maximal value of experiments, when comparing the location update costs, we
total-numm defined as above. only need to count the total distance for all the
boundary-crossings.
} The following table describes the key parameters in the
experiments.
ELSE TABLE II
THE KEY PARAMETERS IN THE EXPERIMENTS
Select a Cell x randomly from any Si(1≤i≤n) The parameters The value
' ' Number of cells 6561
5 S setid = S setid ∪ {Cell x} Number of sub-LDB for an inner LDB 3
Depth of the LDB hierarchical tree 8
6 For all the set Si, (1≤i≤n) Number of mobile clients 100,000
We design two sets of experiments. In one set of
Si=Si-{Cell x}
experiments, we assign a static number (=4) to the mean
} value (for the normal distribution) of the number of
boundary-crossings (NBC) per time unit for a mobile client
setid=setid+1;
and change the deviation (for the normal distribution) of the
} number of boundary-crossings. Then we compare the
location update cost per time unit in the two location database
After the above procedure terminates, the leaf location
'
tree organization method: RC and CSC. The performance
databases corresponding to the sets S setid (setid=1,2, ...., n/d) comparison is shown in Figure 3.
forms a cluster. The clusters of the leaf location databases are
organized recursively in the same way to achieve the total
Location update cost

location update time cost reduction. Due to the limitation of

per time unit

space, the detailed procedure is omitted. 25

20 RC
15
V. SIMULATION PERFORMANCE EVALUATION 10 CSC
As can be seen from the construction of the covering of the 5
0
n location databases, for the location databases between
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5
which there are a larger number of boundary-crossings, they
are clustered to reduce the distance between the location The deviation of the NBC
databases. This can obviously result in the location update
cost reduction. To see to what extent the algorithm can Figure 3. Location update comparison(NBC=4)

0-7803-9335-X/05/$20.00 ©2005 IEEE 1331

 As can be seen from Figure 3, when the deviation of the
NBC becomes larger, this means that there is more difference
in the actual number of boundary-crossings per time unit for
different mobile clients. In other words, there is more
difference in the mobility patterns for different mobile
clients. By using the CRC method, we can achieve a
significant location update cost reduction. Contrary to the
RC method in which the total location update cost remains
almost the same, in the CRC case, the total location update
cost decreases gradually. This is because even though the
total number of boundary-crossings remains stable (because
the mean value of NBC remains the same), the distances for
the frequent boundary-crossings are reduced by using CRC
method. Thus this results in total location update cost
reduction.
In the other set of experiments, we change the mean value
of the NBC for a mobile client and the deviation of the NBC
is set as half of the mean value.
The performance comparison is shown in Figure 4. In both
cases, we can see that with the increase of mean value of
NBC, the total location update cost increases. But the
location update cost increases more slowly in CRC method
than that RC method. Furthermore, location management
cost in the CRC method is much less than that in the RC
method. This is because that with the increase of the NBC
mean value, the NBC deviation also increases (it is half of
the NBC mean value) which means greater different among
the mobility patterns for mobile clients. This gives more
space for the CRC method to organize the location databases
which means more location update cost reduction. The more
location update cost reduction is reflected as more difference
in location update cost between the RC method and CRC
method in Figure 4.
Location update cos t
60
50
time unit
40
30
20
10
0
2 4 6 8
The Mean Value of NBC
Figure 4. Location update cost comparison (Variable Mean Value)
VI. CONCLUSION
Maintaining the real-time locations of mobile clients is
essential to many new mobile computing systems. The
traditional two-tier location database architecture is not
scalable and unsuitable for the new applications in which
there are a very large number of mobile clients. A
hierarchical location database architecture is proposed to
distribute the location update and search workload among
different location databases. However, if the location
databases are not properly organized, the total location
management cost can be very high. When organizing the
location databases, we should take into account the mobility
0-7803-9335-X/05/$20.00 ©2005 IEEE
patterns of the mobile clients. This paper focuses on this
problem with the objective to achieve the location
management cost reduction.
Actually, when organizing the location databases, we
should not only consider the number of boundary-crossings
between different cells but also the number of calls between
them. Furthermore, a mobile client can change its mobility
pattern after the location database tree has been constructed.
So the performance of an ideal location database topological
structure can deteriorate with the time. A location database
re-organization procedure is needed to accommodate the
mobility pattern variation. We are currently concentrating on
these research topics to achieve a better location
management performance.
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