Improving location management for mobile users with frequently visited locations

In wireless computing environment, users’ mobility brings new challenges to traditional computing systems. The explosive growth of demand in communication bandwidth requires new schemes to effectively and efficiently locate users. The Basic HLR/VLR locating scheme does not exploit the fact that many mobile users’ (such as commuters’) moving patterns are likely to be known. In this paper, we propose one locating scheme, the frequently visited locations first (FVLF) scheme, to efficiently locate a mobile user. The FVLF scheme is proposed to prestore the RAs that a mobile user frequently visits according to the probabilities of the RAs that the mobile user may appear. When the system receives a call, these prestored RAs are examined first to locate the callee. This scheme can avoid the high cost of querying the callee’s HLR. The cost model of the proposed scheme is derived and the optimal number of prestored RAs is also found. Our evaluation shows that benefit does exist in various conditions by using this scheme.