Abstract: To reduce the signalling overhead of location management caused by the dual mobility of satellite beam cells and users in low earth orbit satellite networks, a user location management scheme based on an earth-fixed tracking area list is designed. By utilizing the Markov chain to analyze the user location management states and by introducing stochastic geometry theory to estimate the number of paging satellites, a closed-form solution for the signalling overhead of location management in low earth orbit satellite networks is derived. Simulation results show that the proposed location management scheme reduces the overall signalling overhead by 93% compared to the mobile tracking area-based location management method, by 78% compared to movement threshold-based location management method, respectively, with an estimation error for signalling overhead below 1%.

Key words: location management, tracking area list, low earth orbit satellite network