Traffic impacts of international roaming on mobile and personal communications with distributed data management

In this paper, we propose four network interconnection scenarios and the related signaling aspects for the international roaming traffic in mobile and personal communications. With or without international gateway relay nodes summarized from the proposed scenarios, we also derive three international roaming network sets {IR₁, IR₂, IR₃} for the observed signaling traffic model with twolevel databases. Based on the proposed performance metrics, analysis results show that under some reasonable assumptions the signaling traffic of international roaming is significantly impacted by the related gateway relay nodes and databases. In addition, the studied cache data management strategy at VLR can reduce the impacts of the signaling traffic of query operation, but the caching approach cannot improve the performance of update operation. Furthermore, the performance of proposed standalone STP scenario is better than that of integrated STP scenario for the international network connection.