In the past few years there hás been considerable debate over the question of mobility management in móbile cellular communication networks, due to the need of using the signaling system resources in a careful way. Among the strategies of location management, the utilization of registration areas has been difunded since the emergence of the second generation mobile communication systems, allowing to reduce the resource consumption due to location updates. Another concept, named paging areas, has also been extensively employed, allowing to save resources utilized localization of mobile terminals during the call setup for mobile stations. Initially, the Location Area Partitioning Problem (LAPP) is treated as a graph partitioning problem, largely recognized as NP-complete ([GARE 79], [LENG 90]) and leading to the utilization of heuristics, able to produce good sub-optimal solutions. The heuristics are proposed to solve the more usual case, where location areas are coincident with paging areas, and the frequency spectrum (radio resources). With the same methodology, another problem, named Inter- Switch Handover Minimization Problem (ISHMP), is adequately solved, being its relevance due to the elevated system resource consumption and to the severe delays imposed to users when their Mobile Switching Centers are changed. Thus, the diminution of the occurrence of such events id advantageous from both the user`s and the system`s points of view. The heuristics are eddentially the same for the two problems, and it is shown the superiority of the quality of the quality of the obtained solutions, when comparing them with other published results. The work also presents discussion about mobility models employed in the study of problems and techniques in the mobile communications area. Among such models, the fluid flow and the gravitational models are highlighted. A study concerning to the signaling load imposed to the fixed network (including queries and location update traffic over databases) and to the air interface is presented. Finally, starting from the average rate of mobile terminated calls and from a previously defined user impatience threshold, a new proposal for the definition of the optimal number of cells per paging area is presented.