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

For a PCS 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 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 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 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. © 2002 IEEE.