User profile replication with caching for distributed location management in mobile communication networks

Abstract

Location management is an essential process in future mobile communication networks. An important issue is an efficient management of the location database. In this paper, the next generation mobile communication network is proposed to be integrated with a TINA-compliant architecture enabled to handle that kind of mobile-specific processes. This paper discusses the design, and its modeling and comparison of distributed location management strategies based on a TINA-compliant architecture for wireless mobile communication networks. A new location strategy called user profile replication with caching (UPRC) is proposed. In UPRC, user profiles based on user mobility patterns are replicated and combined with caching of the called user profile. This reduces the communication (signaling messages) and computational cost (database accesses) as compared to the location management schemes of simple replication with caching (SRC). A most frequent location area (MFLA) is then introduced which also reduces the number of location update messages between the home location database (HLD) and the visited location database (VLD) in such a way that the location change is reported to the MFLA of the user instead of the HLD. With the MFLA concept, the currently centralized location database becomes a distributed location database taking into account user mobility behavior. The unified performance measures used for comparison are communication costs, computational costs and average total costs.