Performance analysis of pointer forwarding scheme for wireless cellular networks

Location management, a way to track mobile subscribers for service delivery, plays a very significant role in the current and the future wireless mobile networks in effectively delivering services to the mobile users on the move. Many schemes have been proposed and investigated extensively in the last decade. However, most performance analyses were carried out either under simplistic assumptions on some time variables or via simulations. We present a new analytical approach to investigate the tradeoff (cost) analysis for location management schemes under fairly general assumption. In this paper, we focus on pointer forwarding scheme (PFS) and present analytical formulae to compute the total costs. Numerical results show that the traditional exponential approximation may lead to incorrect decision making in the location management scheme. However, our analytical results can be easily used to find the appropriate parameters In PFS.