A cost effective distributed location management strategy for wireless networks

The mobility feature of mobile stations (MSs) imposes a large burden on network traffic control as a result of location management. Design issues of location management include MS registration (updating) and call set-up (paging). Previous approaches introduced several network topologies for updating and paging procedures, but most of them focused on a single problem: either updating optimization or paging optimization. In this paper, we design and integrate two mechanisms, distributed temporary location caches (TLCs) and distributed home location registers (HLRs), to reduce database access delay and to decrease network signaling traffic in both updating and paging for low power, low tier micro cellular systems. By using TLCs, our approach can improve the performance of updating and paging in comparison with previous approaches. Experimental results based on our analytic model show that our location management procedures have lower HLR access rate, lower registration cost, and lower call set-up cost than other approaches.