Mobility management in telepoint networks

Personal communications gives users the freedom to move around and to be addressed and contacted as an individual rather than as a place, a department or a number. The tremendous advances in the miniaturisation of pocket radio telephones would be of less value if the network was unable to route calls to them. Mobility management is the defining issue of personal communications, and although it is by no means the only important technical issue or even the most challenging technical issue, it is set to become increasingly important as networks grow. Mobility management is the process of: locating a travelling user, deducing whether or not he will wish to receive a particular call or not and if so of delivering it to him efficiently. This is quite a demanding task even in conventional cellular systems and it is set to become an ever more difficult task as the volume of calls grow and as the size of cells decreases. Telepoint is in some senses an extreme form of microcellular network. Many of the techniques developed for use on telepoint networks offer valuable lessons for the design of future mobility management techniques