Patent ID: 8644274

Claim:
A method for mobility control of a terminal, wherein a mobility policy parameter is provided which defines the mobility control of the terminal, the mobility policy parameter being part of a mobility policy or subscription record stored for a subscriber of the terminal in a subscriber data base; wherein the mobility policy parameter includes an indication of mobility restriction, wherein the mobility policy parameter is configurable to represent each of three different cases including: a fixed case, in which the terminal is tied to one fixed base station for network entry and no handover is allowed, a nomadic case without handover, in which network entry of the terminal is allowed to any base station and no handover is allowed, and a restricted mobility case, in which network entry and mobility of the terminal are limited to a group of base stations representing a certain area or zone; wherein the nomadic case is orthogonal to the restricted mobility case such that the handover is allowed or disallowed, independently of whether or not the network entry and mobility are limited to the group of base stations representing the certain area or zone; and wherein a network element performs a policy check based on the mobility policy parameter when the terminal requests at least one of the procedures of network entry, idle/active transition, location update, or handover; wherein the mobility policy parameter includes, for defining a mobility restriction of the subscriber, at least one of: a base station identifier, a paging group identifier, a zone identifier which comprises a list of at least one said paging group identifier or one said base station identifier, a list of base station identifiers for small zones, a list of paging group identifiers for large zones, a list of zone identifiers; or a list of base station identifiers/paging group identifiers/zone identifiers, wherein each identifier or list is accompanied by an indication indicating inclusion or exclusion of the respective base station, paging group or zone into or from an allowed network entry, handover, location update or mode change.