Mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks

In heterogeneous wireless networks, mobile users are able to move from their home networks to different foreign networks while maintaining access capability to their subscribed services, which refers to global mobility. One of the key challenges in global mobility management is intersystem location management, which consists of keeping track of mobile users who roam into foreign networks. This paper presents an overview of mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks and introduces a scheme which improves location management efficiency in terms of total signaling costs and intersystem paging delay. More specifically, cost reduction reaches about 50% when comparing the proposed architecture with conventional architectures.