An efficient mobility management for mobile stations plays an important role in mobile communication networks. Two basic operations of mobility management are location registration and paging. A zone-based registration (ZBR) is implemented in most of the mobile communication networks and we consider the mobility management scheme that combines a zone-based registration and a selective paging (SP). We propose a new analytical model that can reflect the characteristics of the ZBR smoothly where location areas of the ZBR are set up so that regions such as roads, bridges, rivers and mountains, where there is relatively little traffic, will constitute their boundaries. We adopt a revised 2-dimensional random walk mobility model to consider such characteristics. In addition, we propose a more efficient division scheme of location area for 2-step selective paging. We evaluate the performance of the mobility management scheme using our mobility model to determine the optimal size of a location area that will result in the minimum signaling traffic on radio channels. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that our mobility model is useful to evaluate the ZBR more exactly. The results of this study can be used effectively in analyzing and comparing the performances of various mobility management schemes.
