Location tracking with distributed HLR's and pointer forwarding

Location tracking operations in a personal communications service (PCS) network are expensive. A location tracking algorithm called pointer forwarding has been proposed to reduce the location update cost. The key observation behind forwarding is that if users change PCS registration areas (RAs) frequently, but receive calls relatively infrequently, it should be possible to avoid registrations at the home-location register (HLR) database by simply setting up a forwarding pointer from the previous visitor-location register (VLR). Calls to a given user will first query the user's HLR to determine the first VLR, which the user was registered at, and then follow a chain of forwarding pointers to the user's current VLR. To reduce the “find” cost in call delivery, the PCS provider may distribute HLR databases in the network. This paper integrates the concept of distributed HLRs with pointer forwarding, and the new scheme is referred to as the pointer forwarding with distributed HLR (PFDHLR). Since no registration to the HLR is performed in the pointer forwarding scheme when a user moves to the new locations, the cost of updating multiple HLRs is eliminated in PFDHLR. Our study indicates that PFDHLR may significantly reduce the mobility management cost compared with the single HLR approach     

带门槛的环形搜索移动性管理策略中移动台所 越过的位置区环数

位置管理或移动性管理是移动计算研究领域的一个具有挑战性的问题.我国及其他国家目前正在使用的个人通信网络如GSM、IS-41中,用两层数据库HLR/VLR支持位置管理.在这些网络中,每当移动台从一个位置区LA(Location area)移动到另一个位置区,其基本的位置管理策略(简称"基本策略")不管是否必要均立即进行位置更新操作,因而造成系统资源的极大浪费,降低了系统的性能.本文给出一种带门槛的环形搜索策略(简称"门槛环形策略")——将位置区分成环,设定一个门槛(整数),当移动台越过的位置区的环数没有达到门槛时,系统不进行位置更新操作,以减少位置管理的费用.在假定移动台的呼入是一个泊松过程,移动台在各个位置区的逗留时间是符合一般概率分布的随机变量的条件下,推导出在两次呼入之间移动台处于各位置区环的概率及移动台所越过的位置区环数公式,给出了"门槛环形策略"的位置管理费用小于"基本策略"的条件.     

Reducing overhead in movement based dynamic location management scheme for cellular networks

One of the key issues in cellular mobile communication is to find the current location of mobile terminal (MT) to deliver the services, which is called location management (LM). Much research has been done on dynamic LM that reduced the LM cost up to a large extent. In movement based dynamic LM scheme, the location area is defined in the form of ring of cells for individual user. Whenever an MT visits a cell outside of its current location area (LA), it triggers location update (LU). For this purpose, network must inform the mobile terminal about ID of all the cells present in its current location area. In this paper, a simple way of cell-ID assignment is proposed under which, network sends only the ID of center cell of LA ring to MT and then MT can compute IDs of all other cells in its location area. This saves a significant amount of wireless bandwidth by minimizing the signaling traffic at VLR level and thus reduces the mobility management overhead.     

An integrated strategy for reducing location management cost

In this letter, an integrated location information management strategy is proposed for mobile networks, where local anchor and replica are deployed to efficiently manage the location information of a mobile terminal (MT) based on its call and mobility characteristics. As an MT's user is roaming within the local signal transfer point (LSTP) region serving the user's home or workplace, the MT's location change is reported to a local anchor (LA)-the visitor location register (VLR) associated with the user's home or workplace. Meanwhile, the LA's location is replicated at several switches (called the replicas) originating relatively high call rates to the MT. As a result, the MT's home location register (HLR) needs to be accessed only when the MT changes its LSTP region or an incoming call for the MT is generated by a nonreplica originating switch. This is shown to reduce location tracking costs.     

Improving the fault tolerance of GSM networks

A PCS network constantly tracks the locations of the mobile stations so that incoming calls can be delivered to the target mobile stations. In general, a two-level database system is used to store location information of the mobile stations. When the location databases fail, incoming calls may be lost. This article describes the standard GSM database failure restoration procedure which reduces the number of lost calls. Then we propose an efficient visitor location register (VLR) identification algorithm for the home location register (HLR) failure recovery procedure, which utilizes mobile station movement information to speed up the recovery procedure     

Group registration with local anchor for location tracking in mobile networks

In mobile networks, the location of a mobile user needs to be traced for successful and efficient call delivery. In existing cellular networks, as a mobile user changes his/her location area (LA), a location registration request is sent to the home location register (HLR) to update the user profile to point to the new LA. With a large number of mobile subscribers, this conventional registration strategy will incur a high volume of signaling traffic. We propose a new location registration strategy, called Group Registration (GR), which efficiently reduces the location registration cost by reporting location changes to the HLR for multiple mobile terminals (MTs) in a single location update request message. Specifically, the IDs of the MTs newly moving into an LA are buffered and sent to the HLR for location update in the route response message of the next incoming call to any MT in the LA. An analytic model is developed and numerical results are presented. It is shown that the proposed GR strategy can achieve significant cost reductions compared to the conventional strategy and the local anchor strategy over a wide range of system parameters. Moreover, the GR strategy results in a much smaller call delivery latency than the local anchor strategy.     

Local anchor scheme for reducing signaling costs in personalcommunications networks

A personal communications network (PCN) location tracking scheme called local anchoring is introduced which reduces the signalling cost as compared to the location management strategy proposed in the IS-41 standard. Local anchoring reduces the number of location registration messages between the home location register (HLR) and the visitor location registers (VLRs) in a way that location change is reported to a nearby VLR called the local anchor (LA) instead of to the HLR. This method successfully reduces the cost for location tracking when the call arrival rate is low relative to the mobility rate and the cost for location registration is high. A dynamic local anchoring mechanism is then introduced which dynamically selects the LA such that the expected cost for location registration and call delivery can be further reduced. It is demonstrated that the cost of dynamic local anchoring is always lower than or equal to that of the IS-41 scheme     

PHS roaming signaling protocol architecture toward global mobilitynetwork

The network for supporting the global personal communication is called the global mobility network (GLOMONET), where global mobility is guaranteed by coordination between intelligent networks (INs). This paper describes the implementation of a roaming signaling protocol for the personal handy-phone system (PHS) GLOMONET, clarifying the concepts of the PHS architecture regarding the GLOMONET. The PHS is a more economical personal communication system than existing cellular systems, by introducing the concept that the PHS service is provided by the most effective use of the existing ISDN and IN functions, where the majority of network functions to provide ISDN services are commonly used for functions for PHS service provision. The PHS mobility function realized by the IN guarantees flexible and effective roaming service provision for the globalization of future personal communication. The proposed PHS signaling protocol architecture is based on the intelligent network capability set 2 (IN CS2) defined by the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Study Group 11 and a visitor location register (VLR) database scheme with efficient signal transfer in the GLOMONET. The PHS specific roaming signaling protocol is defined by the service-independent IN application protocol (INAP). The proposed PHS concepts and roaming signaling protocol were reflected to the national telecommunications standards in the Telecommunication Technical Committee (TTC) and standards in the PHS-memorandum of understanding (MoU)     

An Index-Based Location Management Scheme for PCS Network

Location management provides the guarantee to deliver a call to mobile user during the mobility of user and it is a key challenge in wireless cellular networks. In this paper, we are introducing a new index-based location management scheme. It is based on indexing of location update information at the home agent of network. A tuple of index will keep track of range of location update information and corresponding thread of it, connected to stack of information table. To register a new mobile user, the mobile switching centre will generate a new identification number with the help of mobile switching centre identification number and temporary mobile subscriber identity of subscriber. If, the identification number is with in the range of index then, the Care of Address of mobile subscriber is added to information table else, the index will be reconstruct based on new range of identification number. It has been observed that in proposed technique, the call setup delay and network overheads is reduces over the limitation of minor increment of registration delay. The analytical model and numerical result represents the effectiveness of proposed scheme over the existing schemes.     

On Integrated Location and Service Management for Minimizing Network Cost in Personal Communication Systems

We investigate the notion of per-user integrated location and service management in personal communication service (PCS) networks by which a per-user service proxy is created to serve as a gateway between the mobile user and all client-server applications engaged by the mobile user. The service proxy is always colocated with the mobile user's location database such that whenever the MU's location database moves during a location handoff, a service handoff also ensues to colocate the service proxy with the location database. This allows the proxy to know the location of the mobile user all the time to reduce the network communication cost for service delivery. We investigate four integrated location and service management schemes. Our results show that the centralized scheme performs the best when the mobile user's SMR (service to mobility ratio) is low and CMR (call to mobility ratio) is high, while the fully distributed scheme performs the best when both SMR and CMR are high. In all other conditions, the dynamic anchor scheme is the best except when the service context transfer cost is high, under which the static anchor scheme performs the best. Through analytical and simulation results, we demonstrate that different users with vastly different mobility and service patterns should adopt different integrated location and service management methods to optimize system performance. Further, the best integrated scheme always performs better than the best decoupled scheme that considers location and service managements separately and management schemes that do not use any service proxy.     

A State-based Dynamic Location Management Scheme

We consider a state-based dynamic location management scheme, in which the user is partitioned into different mobility state set, and his location area size is changed dynamically corresponding to the state set that he belongs to. Comparing with the fixed LA scheme, numerical experiment result shows its performance can be improved by 30% whilethe current location and paging procedure can still be applied. Besides, as this scheme does not need to process complicated user information, the requirement of computing power can be decreased significantly in compare with the user-based schemes. Our scheme can be used in current 2G mobile systems (such as GSM, CDMA) and the Third Generation (3G) mobile systems with slightly modification of the equipment software.     

Intelligent paging strategies for third generation mobiletelecommunication systems

Location management procedures, in conjunction with the millions of users expected to subscribe to third generation mobile telecommunication systems, will generate a huge signaling load. In this paper, we propose a method which aims at the reduction of signaling overhead on the radio link produced by the paging procedure. The key idea is the application of a multiple step paging strategy which operates as follows: at the instance of a call terminating to a mobile user who roams within a certain location area, paging is initially performed in a portion of the location area (the paging area) that the so-called “paging related information” indicates. On no paging response, the mobile user is paged in the complementary portion of the location area-this phase can be completed in more than one (paging) step. Various “paging related information” elements (e.g. recent interaction information, high mobility flag, etc.) can be used and several “intelligent” paging strategies can be defined. Representative paging strategies are analyzed in terms of network performance and quality of service (paging signaling, paging delay, processing power requirements), via a simulation tool which models a realistic city area environment     

A class of mobile motion prediction algorithms for wireless mobile computing and communications

This paper describes a class of novel mobile motion prediction algorithms for supporting global mobile data accessing. Traditionally, mobility and routing management includes functions to passively keep track of the location of the users/terminals and to maintain connections to the terminals belonging to the system. To maintain uninterrupted high-quality service for distributed applications, it is important that a mobile system be more intelligent and can anticipate the change of the location of its user. We propose an aggressive mobility and routing management scheme, called predictive mobility management. A class of mobile motion prediction algorithms predicts the future location of a mobile user according to the user's movement history, i.e., previous movement patterns. By combining this scheme with mobility agent functions, the service and user routing data are actually pre-connected and pre-assigned at the locations to which the user is moving. Thus, the user can immediately receive service or data with virtually the same efficiency as at the previous location, i.e., without encountering a large data structure handover delay before service or data is available.     

A crossing-tier location update/paging scheme in hierarchical cellular networks

Location update/paging strategies have been widely studied in the traditional single-tier cellular networks. We propose and evaluate a novel crossing-tier location update/paging scheme that can be used in a hierarchical macrocell/microcell cellular network. Location update is proceeded only in the macrocell tier, where a location area (LA) is made up by larger macrocells. A mobile user will stay in such a LA for longer time. Therefore, the cost on location update can be reduced due to the decreased frequency of location update. To reduce the paging delay, the paged mobile user will be searched in the macrocell tier only when the paging load is not high. Otherwise, it will be searched in the microcell tier, where a sequential searching method is applied. The operation for the scheme is simple, as the macrocell/microcell cellular network has the advantage because a mobile user can receive a signal from both a microcell and the overlaid macrocell. Analytical models have been built for cost and delay evaluation. Numerical results show that, at relatively low cost, the crossing-tier scheme also achieves low paging delay.     

Implicit Deregistration with Forced Registration for PCS Mobility Management

Registration/deregistration with a mobility database called Visitor Location Registers (VLRs) is required in a PCS network when a mobile phone moves between registration areas. Several schemes were proposed to deregister a mobile phone after it moves out of a registration area. A simple scheme, called implicit deregistration, is studied in this paper, which does not specifically deregister any obsolete record in the VLR. If the VLR is full when a mobile phone arrives, a record in the VLR is deleted and the reclaimed storage is reassigned to the incoming mobile phone. It is possible that a valid record will be deleted. If so, the VLR record of a mobile phone may be deleted before a call to the mobile phone arrives. Our previous work assumed that the incoming call setup would be lost. In this paper, we propose forced registration to restore the VLR record before the call setup operation can proceed. With this modification, implicit deregistration totally eliminates the deregistration traffic at the cost of creating some forced registration traffic.We derive the record-missing probability and the portion of the network traffic saved by implicit deregistration. Our study indicates that implicit deregistration with forced registration may significantly reduce the deregistration traffic if the user mobility is high and the number of mobile phones in a registration area is not very large.     

无差别移动性管理网络

为了使IMS网络提供更加灵活的移动性支持,提出了一种无差别移动性管理网络。这种网络可以提供良好的服务移动性和用户移动性,使得用户可以永远以本地用户的身份使用接入地的服务,并对在此网络结构下的用户位置管理和会话建立进行了分析。实验结果表明,这种网络结构可以很好地支持用户移动性和服务的移动性。并且在此网络结构下的会话建立开销和用户位置注册开销,均比IMS目前采用的归属地控制方式下的用户注册开销和会话建立开销要小。     

A selective location update strategy for PCS users

A new location update strategy for personal communication services (PCS) networks and its implementation using a genetic algorithm are proposed. Most of the practical cellular mobile systems partition a geographical region into location areas (LAs) and users are made to update on entering a new LA. The main drawback of this scheme is that it does not consider the individual user mobility and call arrival patterns. Combining these factors with the LAbased approach, we propose an optimal update strategy which determines whether or not a user should update in each LA, and minimizes the average location management cost derived from a userspecific mobility model and call generation pattern. The location management cost optimization problem is also elegantly solved using a genetic algorithm. Detailed simulation experiments are conducted to capture the effects of mobility and callarrival patterns on the location update strategy. The conclusion from this work is that skipping location updates in certain LAs leads to the minimization of the overall location management cost for a user with a specific mobility pattern and even with moderately high call arrival rate.     

Performance modeling of multitier PCS system

The emergence of multitier wireless access is being driven by the different compromises in technology required to provide wireless service in different environments. Three major tiers of wireless access are likely to emerge to providepersonal communications services (PCS): high-tier, low-tier, and unlicensed. Because of the service costs of the three tiers, the unlicensed system is given the highest priority to deliver the calls, and the high-tier system has the lowest priority to deliver the calls. To maintain this delivery priority, two multitier mobility management strategies have been proposed: the single registration strategy (SR) and the modified multiregistration strategy (MR). This paper proposes a new strategy called the lazy deregistration strategy (LDR) and compares the performance of the three strategies. We show that in most cases, LDR outperforms both SR and MR. The registration cost of SR is always no less than the cost of MR. The advantage of MR over SR is more significant if (i) when the user moves into the low-tier system, it is more likely that the currently visited low-tier VLR (visitor location register) is the same as the previously visited VLR, and (ii) the mobile station (MS) is more likely to move between the low-tier system and the high-tier system. The call delivery cost of MR is always no less than the cost of SR. The advantage of SR over MR is more significant if (i) the call arrival rate is large, (ii) the cost of delivering a call to the low-tier system is large, and (iii) the MS is likely to stay in the high-tier system.