Location area planning (LAP) problem is to partition the cellular/mobile network into location areas with the objective of minimizing the total cost in location management. The minimum cost has two components namely location update cost and searching cost. Location update cost is incurred when the user changes itself from one location area to another in the network. The searching cost incurred when a call arrives, the search is done only in the location area to find the user. Hence, it is important to find a compromise between the location update and paging operations such that the cost of mobile terminal location tracking cost is a minimum. The complete mobile network is divided into location areas. Each location area consists of a group of cells. This partitioning problem is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we use particle swarm optimization (PSO) to obtain the best/optimal group of cells for 16, 36, 49, and 64 cells network. Experimental studies illustrate that PSO is more efficient and surpasses those of precious studies for these benchmarking problems.