An efficient location cache scheme for three‐level database architecture in PCS networks

Recently, hierarchical architecture for location databases has been proposed in order to accommodate the growing number of personal communication systems users. With the three‐level hierarchical database architecture, which is compatible with the current cellular mobile systems, newly developed additional databases, including the regional location database (RLR), are positioned between the HLR and the VLRs. We propose an efficient cache scheme, the double T‐thresholds location cache scheme, which could reduce the network and database costs to lookup a portable using the three‐level architecture. This scheme extends the existing T‐threshold location cache scheme, which is effective only under the two‐level architecture of location databases currently adopted by IS‐41 and GSM. The idea behind our proposed scheme is to use two pieces of cache information, VLR and RLR, which serve the called portables. These two pieces are required in order to exploit not only the locality of a registration area (RA), but also the locality of a regional registration area (RRA), a wide area covered by the RLR. We also use two threshold values in order to determine whether the two pieces are obsolete. In order to model the RRA residence time, the branching Erlang‐∞ distribution is introduced. The cost analysis presented in this paper shows that the double T‐thresholds location cache scheme significantly reduces the network and database costs for most patterns of portables. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic mobile user location update for wireless PCS networks

The basic architecture of a personal communication network consists of a wireline network and mobile terminals. Each mobile terminal communicates with the wireline network through a nearby base station. In order to route incoming calls to a destination mobile terminal, the network must keep track of the location of each mobile terminal from time to time. This is achieved bylocation update such that each mobile terminal reports its current location to the network at specific time points. When an incoming call arrives, the network will page the mobile terminal starting from the last updated location. A trade-off, therefore, exists between the frequency of location update and the number of locations paged in order to track down the mobile terminal. This paper introduces a location update policy which minimizes the cost of mobile terminal location tracking. A mobile terminal dynamically determines when to update after moving to a new cell based on its mobility pattern and the incoming call arrival probability. The performance of this scheme is close to that of the optimal policy reported earlier. However, the processing time requirement of this scheme is very low. The minimal computation required by this scheme enables its usage in mobile terminals which has limited energy supply and computational power.     

An analysis of location record checkpointing interval for mobility database in PCS networks

Mobility database that stores the users’ location records is very important to connect calls to mobile users on personal communication networks. If the mobility database fails, calls to mobile users may not be set up in time. This paper studies failure restoration of mobility database. We study per-user location record checkpointing schemes that checkpoint a user’s record into a non-volatile storage from time to time on a per-user basis. When the mobility database fails, the user location records can be restored from the backup storage. Numeric analysis has been used to choose the optimum checkpointing interval so that the overall cost is minimized. The cost function that we consider includes the cost of checkpointing a user’s location record and the cost of paging a user due to an invalid location record. Our results indicate that when user registration intervals are exponentially distributed, the user record should never be checkpointed if checkpointing costs more than paging. Otherwise, if paging costs more, the user record should be always checkpointed when a user registers.     

Historical based location management strategies for PCS networks

Wireless Networks - Due to the current popularity of wireless communication, personal communication service networks have attracted a lot of attention. As mobile terminals (MTs) in such networks...     

A layered protocol architecture for multimedia wireless‐PCS networks

Coupled with the growing interest in the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) as a standard for future mobile communications, the need for a set of functions to effectively support multimedia teleservices in such an environment is also increasing. Starting from the idea that multimedia means the integrated manipulation of different information and hence the independent handling of separate information is not satisfactory, an enhanced protocol architecture for the support of multimedia teleservices in Wireless Personal Communication Systems based on UMTS is proposed. It involves Physical, MAC, Data Link, and Network layers. A Synchronisation Sub-Layer is introduced on the MAC level with the main aim of assuring a rough multimedia inter-stream synchronisation over the air interface, which is a first step prior to a fine end-to-end synchronisation performed by higher layers. Proposed functions, their basic algorithms, their location in the protocol stack, as well as the signalling exchange among modules implementing them, on network and user sides, are described in detail in the paper. The resulting architecture well fits the demanding nature of multimedia services and can be easily interfaced with the wired backbone of the system. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Two-level pointer forwarding strategy for location management in PCS networks

For a IPCS network to effectively deliver services to its mobile users, it must have an efficient way to keep track of the mobile users. The location management fulfills this task through location registration and paging. To reduce the signaling traffic, many schemes such as a local anchor (LA) scheme, per-user caching scheme and pointer forwarding scheme have been proposed in the past. In this paper, we present a new location management scheme which intends to mitigate the signaling traffic as well as reduce the tracking delay in the PCS systems. In this strategy, we choose a set of visitor location registers (VLRs) traversed by users as the mobility agents (MA), which form another level of management in order to make some registration signaling traffic localized. The idea is as follows: instead of always updating to the home location register (HLR), which would become the bottleneck otherwise, many location updates are carried out in the mobility agents. Thus, the two-level pointer forwarding scheme is designed to reduce the signaling traffic: pointers can be set up between VLRs as the traditional pointer forwarding scheme and can also be set up between MAs. The numerical results show that this strategy can significantly reduce the network signaling traffic for users with low CMR without increasing much of the call setup delay.     

EDBLU: enhanced direction-based location update scheme for PCS networks

An enhanced direction-based location update scheme (EDBLU) is presented. Unlike the direction-based location update (DBLU) scheme, in EDBLU the location update depends on both the moving direction and the moving distance. The performance of EDBLU is analysed based on the discrete-time 2D Markov walk model. The results confirm that the EDBLU scheme reduces the signalling cost significantly for different mobility patterns.     

A direction-based location update scheme with a line-pagingstrategy for PCS networks

On the problem of location update and terminal paging, many schemes using ring-paging strategies have been proposed. However, sequentially paging the rings surrounding the mobile user's last updated location may cause large paging cost. We propose a direction-based location update (DBLU) scheme using a line-paging strategy to reduce the paging cost. A moving direction identification mechanism using only simple computations detects the change of moving direction and updates the mobile's location. The numerical results show that our DBLU scheme achieves good performance when the paging cost is high     

An adaptive distance-based location update algorithm fornext-generation PCS networks

In this paper, we propose a stochastic model to compute the optimal update boundary for the distance-based location update algorithm. The proposed model is flexible and captures some of the real characteristics in the wireless cellular environment. The model can adapt to arbitrary cell topologies in which the number of neighboring base stations at different locations may vary. The cell residence time can follow general distributions which captures the fact that the mobile user may spend more time at certain locations than others. The model also incorporates the concept of a trip in which the mobile user may follow a particular path to a destination. For implementation, the decision of location update can be made by a simple table lookup. Numerical results indicate that the proposed model provides a more accurate update boundary in real environment than that derived from a hexagonal cell configuration with a random walk movement pattern. The proposed model allows the network to maintain a better balance between the processing incurred due to location update and the radio bandwidth utilized for paging between call arrivals     

Dynamical mobile terminal location registration in wireless PCS networks

In this paper, we propose a mobile terminal (MT) location registration/update model. In this model, the registration decision is based on two factors-the time elapsed since last call arrival and the distance the MT has traveled since last registration. It is established that the optimal registration strategy can be represented by a curve. Only when the state of the system reaches this curve is a registration performed. In order for an MT to calculate its traveled distance, an interactive implementation scheme and a distance calculation algorithm are developed. When the call interarrival times are independent and geometrically distributed, the proposed model becomes a distance-based model and, in this case, the optimal registration strategy is of threshold structure. For the distance-based model, a single sample path-based ordinal optimization algorithm is devised. In this algorithm, without any knowledge about the system parameters, the MT observes the system state transitions, estimates the ordinal of a set of strategies, and updates the registration strategy adaptively. Since only a single sample path is used, this algorithm can be implemented online. Several numerical examples are provided to compare the proposed model and the existing ones.     

More efficient location tracking in PCS systems using a noveldistributed database system

In personal communication services (PCS), the complete location information and subscribers' profiles are kept in a database called the home location register (HLR). Another database, the visitor location register (VLR), is used to store partial location information. When a mobile user is called, the system queries the HLR to determine the location of the called party. Distributed databases have been introduced to improve the efficiency of querying the HLR. This paper presents an alternative means of constructing a distributed database. The proposed database design employs fixed pointers to link distributed data. Each database contains a portion of the system's information as well as several pointers. The pointers identify the location of real data, enabling the system to obtain the required information efficiently. The database of the proposed design is markedly smaller than the fully distributed databases since each database of the proposed design stores only partial information. Subscriber information is stored only in one database, thus allowing a single database, rather than multiple databases, to be updated. The single update presented herein notably reduces the signal traffic load. If the caller is in the registration area of some HLR, which holds the called party's information, the response time is significantly decreased since the transactions are served only by the local database. This phenomenon is referred to as the calling locality. The proposed method effectively shares the database and the network loading that originates from several databases' tracking mobile users in a PCS system. According to the results presented, this method is highly effective for systems with a heavy load and high calling locality. The single update feature of the proposed design reduces the traffic in the signaling link and the processing load of a database. However, the proposed method includes no fault tolerance and therein differs from the fully distributed design     

Dynamic agent-based hierarchical multicast for wireless mesh networks

We propose and analyze a multicast algorithm named Dynamic Agent-based Hierarchical Multicast (DAHM) for wireless mesh networks that supports user mobility and dynamic group membership. The objective of DAHM is to minimize the overall network cost incurred. DAHM dynamically selects multicast routers serving as multicast agents for integrated mobility and multicast service management, effectively combining backbone multicast routing and local unicast routing into an integrated algorithm. As the name suggests, DAHM employs a two-level hierarchical multicast structure. At the upper level is a backbone multicast tree consisting of mesh routers with multicast agents being the leaves. At the lower level, each multicast agent services those multicast group members within its service region. A multicast group member changes its multicast agent when it moves out of the service region of the current multicast agent. The optimal service region size of a multicast agent is a critical system parameter. We propose a model-based approach to dynamically determine the optimal service region size that achieves network cost minimization. Through a comparative performance study, we show that DAHM significantly outperforms two existing baseline multicast algorithms based on multicast tree structures with dynamic updates upon member movement and group membership changes.     

Deregistration strategies for PCS networks

This paper studies three deregistration strategies (explicit, implicit, and timeout (TO) deregistration) for personal communication service (PCS) networks to determine the network conditions under which each strategy, gives the best performance. Two performance measures are considered: (1) the probability α that a portable cannot register (and receive service) and (2) the number of deregistration messages sent in a strategy. For the same database size, α is smaller for explicit deregistration (ED) than it is for TO or implicit deregistration (ID). On the other hand, ID does not create any deregistration message traffic. With an appropriate TO period, the deregistration message traffic for TO deregistration is much smaller than the traffic for ED. Suppose that there are N portables in a registration area (RA) on the average. To ensure that α<10^-3 our study indicates that if the database size is larger than 4N, then the implicit scheme should be selected (to eliminate deregistration traffic). If the database size is smaller than 1.5 N, then the explicit scheme should be selected. Otherwise, the TO scheme should be selected to achieve the best performance     

A batch‐update strategy for the distributed HLRs architecture in PCS networks

Owing to the increasing population of mobile subscribers, the rapidly expanding signaling traffic has become a challenge to the mobility management in PCS networks. Multiple database schemes to reduce signal traffic and to solve the bottleneck problem of the single home location register (HLR) architecture have been proposed by many researchers. However, in most of the multiple location databases or HLR systems, extra signaling is required for the multiple database updates. We propose a batch‐update strategy, instead of the immediate update method, for the location‐tracking schemes with replication to reduce the signaling overhead. In this paper, we first introduce a distributed HLRs architecture in which each HLR is associated with a localized set of VLRs and the location registrations and queries are processed locally. Then we propose our batch‐update strategy and present two pointing schemes for inter‐HLR call deliveries. The numerical result shows that our approach can effectively decrease the signaling cost of location registration and call delivery compared with the IS‐41 standard. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy for mobile IP networks

One of the major challenges for the wireless network design is the efficient mobility management, which can be addressed globally (macromobility) and locally (micromobility). Mobile Internet protocol (IP) is a commonly accepted standard to address global mobility of mobile hosts (MHs). It requires the MHs to register with the home agents (HAs) whenever their care-of addresses change. However, such registrations may cause excessive signaling traffic and long service delay. To solve this problem, the hierarchical mobile IP (HMIP) protocol was proposed to employ the hierarchy of foreign agents (FAs) and the gateway FAs (GFAs) to localize registration operations. However, the system performance is critically affected by the selection of GFAs and their reliability. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy for mobile IP networks, in which different hierarchies are dynamically set up for different users and the signaling burden is evenly distributed among the network. To justify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the signaling cost. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy can significantly reduce the system signaling cost under various scenarios and the system robustness is greatly enhanced. Our analysis also shows that the new scheme can outperform the Internet Engineering Task Force mobile IP hierarchical registration scheme in terms of the overall signaling cost. The more important contribution is the novel analytical approach in evaluating the performance of mobile IP networks.     

A distributed database architecture for global roaming in next-generation mobile networks

The next-generation mobile network will support terminal mobility, personal mobility, and service provider portability, making global roaming seamless. A location-independent personal telecommunication number (PTN) scheme is conducive to implementing such a global mobile system. However, the nongeographic PTNs coupled with the anticipated large number of mobile users in future mobile networks may introduce very large centralized databases. This necessitates research into the design and performance of high-throughput database technologies used in mobile systems to ensure that future systems will be able to carry efficiently the anticipated loads. This paper proposes a scalable, robust, efficient location database architecture based on the location-independent PTNs. The proposed multitree database architecture consists of a number of database subsystems, each of which is a three-level tree structure and is connected to the others only through its root. By exploiting the localized nature of calling and mobility patterns, the proposed architecture effectively reduces the database loads as well as the signaling traffic incurred by the location registration and call delivery procedures. In addition, two memory-resident database indices, memory-resident direct file and T-tree, are proposed for the location databases to further improve their throughput. Analysis model and numerical results are presented to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed database architecture. Results have revealed that the proposed database architecture for location management can effectively support the anticipated high user density in the future mobile networks.     

Adaptive region-based location management for PCS systems

The personal communications services (PCSs) systems can provide ubiquitous and customized services. The key issue, which affects the performance of the whole system, is the location management. We propose a region-based location strategy by taking advantage of the user's movement behavior to improve the performance of the conventional systems. Each mobile user is associated with a set of regions, which are derived from the user's movement patterns. The registration processes in the same region can be eliminated such that the cost of location management can be significantly reduced. Several design issues are studied by considering the workload balance and the call-to-mobility ratio for a user. The proposed strategy can be dynamically adjusted based on different system parameters and user behavior. A performance analysis on the signaling cost and the database access cost is given to justify the benefits of this approach     

个人通信位置管理的计时双位置算法

提出了一种新的位置管理算法——计时双位置算法，从理论上导出了TTLA算法的总代价函数，给出了传统IS-41和双位置算法(TLA)的统～数学框架。通过性能分析可知，TTLA算法能根据用户的呼叫移动比，在IS-41和TLA两者之间进行选择，综合性能好，且在某些情况下，性能要超过另两种算法。     

Group deregistration strategy for PCS networks

This letter proposes a novel deregistration strategy-group deregistration-for PCS networks. In the proposed strategy, instead of deregistering a mobile terminal (MT) right after the MT leaves its registration area (RA), the home location register (HLR) keeps the MT's identification in a list associated with the RA. When the next registration from the RA arrives, the HLR sends the MT identification list to the RA along with the registration acknowledgment message. The RA then deregisters these MTs. Compared to the conventional deregistration strategy, the proposed strategy greatly reduces both the signaling traffic and the database load     

Modeling techniques for large-scale PCS networks

There has been rapid growth in the demand for mobile communications that has led to intensive research and development of complex PCS (personal communication services) networks. Capacity planning and performance modeling are necessary to maintain a high quality of service to the PCS subscriber while minimizing costs. Effective and practical performance models for large-scale PCS networks are available. Two new performance models are presented in this article which can be solved using analytical techniques. The first is the so-called portable population model, based on the flow equivalent assumption (the rate of portables into a cell equals the rate of portables out of the cell). The model provides the steady-state portable population distribution in a cell that is independent of the portable residual time distribution, which can be used by simulations to reduce the necessary execution time by reaching the steady state more rapidly. Additionally, this model can be used to study the blocking probability of a low (portable) mobility PCS network and the performance of portable deregistration strategies. The second model is the so-called portable movement model which can be used to study location tracking and handoff algorithms. The model assumes that the arriving calls to a portable form a Poisson process, and portable residual times have a general distribution. This model can be used to study location-tracking algorithms and handoff algorithms. It is shown that under some assumptions, the analytic techniques are consistent with the simulation model