A new analytic framework for dynamic mobility management of PCS networks

This paper presents a new analytic framework for dynamic location management of PCS networks. Based on the theory of hexagonal cellular patterns, a novel two-dimensional Markov walk model with six states is proposed to characterize the dynamic behavior of the intercell movements for a mobile station. We discover a broad class of isotropic processes having an identical uniform steady-state distribution of the six directions, but distinct circulant transition probability matrices. Six special isotropic processes exhibiting IID, directional, turning, ping-pong, h-spin, and t-spin mobility patterns are identified for performance comparison. We also generalize the selective paging strategy by introducing the concept of probabilistic selective paging (PSP) to reduce the paging cost. A unified analysis using recursive computations is carried out to compute the exact probability distribution for the number of per-call location updates. We calculate the location profile with respect to an incoming call and derive an exact expression of the average paging cost for PSP. With its ability to distinguish subtle performance variations and unveil new features of various dynamic location management schemes, our analytic framework is demonstrated to provide more precise and insightful results than conventional analysis.     

Predictive distance-based mobility management for multidimensional PCS networks

This paper presents a mobile tracking scheme that exploits the predictability of user mobility patterns in wireless PCS networks. In this scheme, a mobile's future location is predicted by the network, based on the information gathered from the mobile's recent report of location and velocity. When a call is made, the network pages the destination mobile around the predicted location. A mobile makes the same location prediction as the network does; it inspects its own location periodically and reports the new location when the distance between the predicted and the actual locations exceeds a threshold. To more realistically represent the various degrees of velocity correlation in time, a Gauss-Markov mobility model is used. For practical systems where the mobility pattern varies over time, we propose a dynamic Gauss-Markov parameter estimator that provides the mobility parameters to the prediction algorithm. Based on the Gauss-Markov model, we describe an analytical framework to evaluate the cost of mobility management for the proposed scheme. We also present an approximation method that reduces the computational complexity of the cost evaluation for multidimensional systems. We then compare the cost of predictive mobility management against that of the regular, nonpredictive distance-based scheme, for both the case with ideal Gauss-Markov mobility pattern and the case with time-varying mobility pattern.     

PCS mobility support over fixed ATM networks

As broadband multimedia services and wireless services become popular, there is growing interest in the industry to support ATM over a wireless link, and wireless access to fixed ATM networks. We focus on the internetworking of PCS and ATM networks, in which the air interface remains one of the PCS standards and the backbone is an ATM network with mobility support. It is desirable to minimize the impact of the internetworking and mobility support on the existing/emerging PCS and ATM specifications. A network architecture, a protocol reference model, and signaling protocols for PCS mobility support over fixed ATM networks are described. They are compared against other implementation alternatives and the trade-offs are discussed. Some performance results of the proposed architecture are also presented     

Ant colony prediction by using sectorized diurnal mobility model for handover management in PCS networks

Recently, mobile phones are extremely used in lifestyle. Historical records of mobile users (MUs) play an important role in predicting future movements of new visitors of the underlying registration area. Handover (handoff) is one of important quality of service (QoS) parameter that affects the continuity of the call when MUs move from a cell to its neighbors in the same registration area (RA). In this paper, a novel ant based Algorithm, has been introduced, which is called Ant Prediction Algorithm (APA). The main target of APA is to reduce handover impact on the performance of personal communication service (PCS) networks. To accomplish such aim, APA tries to minimize the number of dropped calls by predicting the long-term movement of MUs based on the Sectored Diurnal Mobility Model (SDMM). APA consists of two Parts, namely; (i) the Ant Prediction Engine (APE), which relies on the movement history of the other MUs to predict the future movement of the considered MU, and (ii) the SDMM design, which predicts the exact future sector and cell of the considered MU. Simulations have been presented to validate the proposed scheme in terms of prediction accuracy and handoff blocking probability.

     

Teletraffic analysis and mobility modeling of PCS networks

Channel holding time is of primary importance in teletraffic analysis of PCS networks. This quantity depends on user's mobility which can be characterized by the cell residence time. We show that when the cell residence time is not exponentially distributed, the channel holding time is not exponentially distributed either, a fact also confirmed by available field data. In order to capture the essence of PCS network behaviour, including the characterization of channel holding time, a correct mobility model is therefore necessary. The new model must be good enough to fit field data, while at the same time resulting in a tractable queueing system. We propose a new mobility model, called the hyper-Erlang distribution model, which is consistent with these requirements. Under the new realistic operational assumption of this model, in which the cell residence time is generally distributed, we derive analytical results for the channel holding time distribution, which are readily applicable to the hyper-Erlang distribution models. Using the derived analytical results we demonstrate how the distribution of the cell residence time affects the channel holding time distribution. The results presented in this paper can provide guidelines for field data processing in PCS network design and performance evaluation     

Optimal fractional movement-based scheme for PCS location management

In this letter, we propose a fractional movement-based location update scheme for personal communication service networks. Similar to the well-known fractional guard channel scheme for channel assignments, in our proposed scheme, the movement threshold is a real number with a fraction instead of an integer. We prove analytically that there is a unique optimal fractional movement threshold that minimizes the total cost of location updates and paging per call arrival.     

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...     

Restoration scheme of mobility databases by mobility learning andprediction in PCS networks

This paper proposes a restoration scheme based on mobility learning and prediction in the presence of the failure of mobility databases in personal communication systems (PCSs). In PCSs, mobility databases must maintain the current location information of users to provide a fast connection for them. However, the malfunction of mobility databases may cause some location information to be lost. As a result, without an explicit restoration procedure, incoming calls to users may be rejected. Therefore, an explicit restoration scheme against the malfunction of mobility databases is needed to guarantee continuous service availability to users. Introducing mobility learning and prediction into the restoration process allows systems to locate users after a failure of mobility databases. In failure-free operations, the movement patterns of users are learned by a neuro-fuzzy inference system (NFIS). After a failure, an inference process of the NFIS is initiated and the users' future location is predicted. This is used to locate lost users after a failure. This proposal differs from previous approaches using a checkpoint because it does not need a backup process nor additional storage space to store checkpoint information. In addition, simulations show that our proposal can reduce the cost needed to restore the location records of lost users after a failure when compared to the checkpointing scheme     

Dynamically adapting registration areas to user mobility and call patterns for efficient location management in PCS networks

In this paper, we propose an extension to the personal communication services (PCS) location management protocol which uses dynamically overlapped registration areas. The scheme is based on monitoring the aggregate mobility and call pattern of the users during each reconfiguration period and adapting to the mobility and call patterns by either expanding or shrinking registration areas at the end of each reconfiguration period. We analytically characterize the trade-off resulting from the inclusion or exclusion of a cell in a registration area in terms of expected change in aggregate database access cost and signaling overhead. This characterization is used to guide the registration area adaption in a manner in which the signaling and database access load on any given location register (LR) does not exceed a specified limit. Our simulation results show that it is useful to dynamically adapt the registration areas to the aggregate mobility and call patterns of the mobile units when the mobility pattern exhibits locality. For such mobility and call patterns, the proposed scheme can greatly reduce the average signaling and database access load on LRs. Further, the cost of adapting the registration areas is shown to be low in terms of memory and communication requirements.     

PCS mobility management using the reverse virtual call setupalgorithm

The increased demand for wireless mobile communications coupled with the finite available spectrum has motivated investigation into alternative methods of tracking users and delivering calls. We present a new scheme for delivering mobile terminated calls named reverse virtual call setup (RVC). Only a few new fixed network SS7 signaling messages are needed to implement this protocol; we specify them here. RVC can function within the existing cellular paging network or with an integrated overlaid paging network. The relative performance of RVC for both scenarios is investigated     

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.     

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.     

A dynamic anchor-cell assisted paging with an optimal timer for PCS networks

An intra location area (intra-LA) location update (LU) scheme is proposed to increase paging accuracy for PCS networks. In the proposed scheme, each mobile terminal (MT) has a valid/invalid anchor-cell, which may be dynamically changed. A MT updates its anchor-cell information only when the status is changed, i.e., from the valid to the invalid or vice versa. Therefore, the intra-LA LU cost is minimized. Whenever the MT enters a cell, a timer is set. The MT realizes that the entered cell is its current anchor-cell if the timer expires before leaving the cell. An analytical model is proposed, and the optimal time threshold is derived explicitly.     

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     

Schemes for mobility management of wireless ATM networks

The growing fields of wireless networks and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) are merging to form wireless ATM networks. This paper addresses dynamic bandwidth allocation, connection admission procedures, routing, and location management strategies in wireless ATM. More precisely, we investigate the issue of extending the private Network to Network Interface, PNNI, and protocols to support mobility. PNNI‐based hierarchical routing, hand‐off, location management and routing schemes are proposed to integrate wireless capabilities into ATM networks. These schemes provide fast and efficient hand‐off connection processing mechanism and a reduction in the connection disruption time during a connection hand‐off session. They also provide a predictable resource requirement of the mobile system during its connection. During a connection hand‐off, misrouted cells can be re‐routed to their destinations. This substantially reduces the overhead due to end‐to‐end re‐transmissions invoked at higher layers. An analytical model is developed to illustrate the hand‐off algorithm. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PCS网络中位置管理的二级HLR法

本文对PCS系统中漫游用户的位置管理提出了一种新的处理方法：二级HLR法。与IS－41、GSM以及前向指针法相比，它可使系统在用户漫游时节省长登记、注销业务量以及避免长途网络资源分配的浪费，同时又不会对运营商提出过高的基础网络建设要求。通过使漫游用户信息放入漫游地HLR的专用储存区（即漫游用户登记操作本地化）从而尽可能降低其登记注销开销。由于存储器价格日趋下降，本文提出的方案具有较强的可行性。     

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     

Architectures for IP-based network-assisted mobility management across heterogeneous networks [architectures and protocols for mobility management in all-IP mobile networks]

In this article new architectures for network- assisted management of vertical handovers are proposed, relying on IP-based protocols, aiming at achieving the most relevant intersystem mobility decision with respect to user satisfaction and operator added value. The key design principle used is ease of deployment, with flexible hierarchical handover decision entities allowing the distribution of the decision process across local and global levels. The decision itself relies on a broad set of parameters at the radio, networking, application, user preferences, and operator policies levels. The advantage of the approach is highlighted in the specific cellular/WLAN scenario, and a proof-of-concept testbed has enabled to validate it. Standardization in this area is currently ongoing in 3GPP, IEEE, and IETF.     

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