Location management employing two-level forwarding pointers in PCS networks

We present a new location tracking scheme which intends to mitigate the signaling traffic for location management in the PCs systems. For a PCS network to effectively deliver services to its mobile users, it must have an efficient way to locate the mobile users. The location management fulfills this task through location registration and paging. To reduce the signaling traffic, many schemes such as local anchor (LA) scheme, peruser caching scheme and pointer forwarding scheme have been proposed. In our two-level forwarding strategy, we choose a set of VLRs traversed by users as the mobility agents (MA), which form another level of location management to make many registrations localized. Pointers can then be setup between VLRs as the traditional pointer forwarding scheme as well as between MAs. The numerical results show that this strategy can significantly reduce the network signaling traffic for users with low call-to-mobility ratio (CMR) without increasing much of the call setup delay.