Location management

which consists of location updating and location query

is a challenging topic in mobile communication.The location query of the basic location management scheme (Basic Scheme for short) used in personal communications services (PCS) networks in many countries

requires to page a mobile in all the cells within a location area (LA) simultaneously.This scheme is likely to waste the system's channel resource and processing resource enormously

since the LA consists of many cells whereas the mobile only resides in one.This paper proposed a new location management scheme

Cell Layered Scheme

which grouped all the cells of each LA into layers and made terminal paging one layer after another in probability order.Both the probability of the mobile residing in each layer and the average number of cells searched by the proposed scheme are derived on the assumption that the residence time of a mobile residing in each cell is a generally distributed random variable.It is proved that the cost of the Cell Layered Scheme is no more than that of the Basic Scheme.