Garbage collection of forwarding pointers in distributed HLR environment

This paper studies the pointer forwarding scheme for mobility management in personal communication services (PCS). In pointer forwarding schemes, the original registration message to the home location registers (HLR) is eliminated. Instead, a pointer is constructed at the old VLR to point to the new visitor location registers (VLR). When a call arrives, the HLR locates the current VLR by tracing the pointers. The pointer forwarding scheme do not reclaim the obsolete pointers based on the assumption that the VLR´s can have enough storage space. This paper extends the pointer forwarding scheme by proposing the garbage collection mechanism