Per-user checkpointing for mobility database failure restoration

This paper studies the failure restoration of mobility database for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). We consider a per-user checkpointing approach for the home location register (HLR) database. In this approach, individual HLR records are saved into a backup database from time to time. When a failure occurs, the backup record is restored back to the mobility database. We first describe a commonly used basic checkpoint algorithm. Then, we propose a new checkpoint algorithm. An analytic model is developed to compare these two algorithms in terms of the checkpoint cost and the probability that an HLR backup record is obsolete. This analytic model is validated against simulation experiments. Numerical examples indicate that our new algorithm may significantly outperform the basic algorithm in terms of both performance measures.