Routing Area
The routing area is the PS domain equivalent of the location area. A "routing area" is normally a subdivision of a "location area". Routing areas are used by mobiles which are GPRS-attached. GPRS is optimized for "bursty" data communication services, such as wireless internet/intranet, and multimedia services. It is also known as GSM-IP ("Internet Protocol") because it will connect users directly to Internet Service Providers (ISP).
The bursty nature of packet traffic means that more paging messages are expected per mobile, and so it is worth knowing the location of the mobile more accurately than it would be with traditional circuit-switched traffic. A change from routing area to routing area (called a "Routing Area Update") is done in an almost identical way to a change from location area to location area. The main differences are that the "Serving GPRS Support Node" (SGSN) is the element involved.
Read more about this topic: Mobility Management
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