Two mobile terminal (MT) power on/off state management schemes are introduced based on the level of location registers (LRs) for managing the state information of MTs. The performance of the two MT power on/off state management schemes is compared based on the expected on/off duration and the expected number of incoming call arrivals between two consecutive detach and attach requests (call-to-transition ratio (CTR)). An adaptive algorithm is proposed here that incorporates both schemes for each mobile user. The results show that as the CTR value of a mobile user varies, the proposed algorithm adaptively selects an appropriate scheme in real time. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.