A Novel Location Tracking Scheme for Reducing Location Updating Traffic in a Personal Communication System

How to reduce location updating traffic is a critical issue for tracking the current locations of users in a personal communication system. Traditional location management approaches usually bring about network overload or bottleneck of the HLR when a mobile user moves back and forth between adjacent location areas. So far, many works have focused on this research topic to solve the location updating rate or the location updating cost. In this paper, we shall employ both concepts of time stamp and virtual overlapping to propose a newly developed scheme for reducing both the location updating rate and the location updating cost. From the simulated results, our scheme can significantly reduce the location updating traffic.     

Group location tracking based on representative identity andvirtual VLR for transportation systems

A location tracking scheme known as group location tracking (GLT) is proposed to reduce the location update cost for terrestrial transportation systems (TSs) in personal communication networks. When a TS moves into a new registration area, the GLT scheme, based on a representative identity of the TS and a virtual visitor location register, updates location information by a group location update request message instead of individual location update of users. Compared with the IS-41, the GLT scheme significantly reduces signaling load     

Locating strategies for personal communication networks, a noveltracking strategy

The partition of location areas is designed to minimize the total costs of finding users' location and tracking their movement in personal communication networks (PCNs). A new scheme to partition and track mobile users and its implementation based on cellular architecture are proposed. According to the tracking strategy, the mobile station (MS) transmits only update messages at specific reporting cells, while the search for a mobile user is done at the vicinity of the cell to which the user has just reported. We use the cost analysis model to demonstrate the feasibility of updating and searching costs to reduce the amount of resources when using wireless channels. Simulations are performed to compare the performance of three schemes: always update, always search, and our new scheme     

A crossing-tier location update/paging scheme in hierarchical cellular networks

Location update/paging strategies have been widely studied in the traditional single-tier cellular networks. We propose and evaluate a novel crossing-tier location update/paging scheme that can be used in a hierarchical macrocell/microcell cellular network. Location update is proceeded only in the macrocell tier, where a location area (LA) is made up by larger macrocells. A mobile user will stay in such a LA for longer time. Therefore, the cost on location update can be reduced due to the decreased frequency of location update. To reduce the paging delay, the paged mobile user will be searched in the macrocell tier only when the paging load is not high. Otherwise, it will be searched in the microcell tier, where a sequential searching method is applied. The operation for the scheme is simple, as the macrocell/microcell cellular network has the advantage because a mobile user can receive a signal from both a microcell and the overlaid macrocell. Analytical models have been built for cost and delay evaluation. Numerical results show that, at relatively low cost, the crossing-tier scheme also achieves low paging delay.     

An efficient location forwarding with shortcut scheme for position-based routing in mobile ad-hoc networks

Position-based routing protocols are considered as having better scalability and lower control overhead than topology-based routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Since location services are the most critical part of position-based routing protocols, we present an Efficient Location Forwarding with Shortcuts (ELFS) scheme to improve the performance of location services. The ELFS scheme uses multiple virtual home regions to achieve efficient location discovery. We develop three approaches to reducing the overhead of maintaining multiple virtual home regions. The first approach, shortcut updates, uses the idea of shortcut to decrease the frequency of global updates. The second approach, adaptive broadcasting, alleviates the cost of each global update. In certain conditions, ELFS only broadcasts the messages of location update to the regions with the longest query paths. The third approach, packet forwarding with direction awareness, reduces the path lengths of messages. It can improve the cost of transmitting location information for delay-tolerant applications. With these approaches, the frequency of global broadcasting is decreased, and the overhead of location maintenance is reduced significantly. The simulation results show that the performance of ELFS is comparably fast and stable.     

Hierarchical location service for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a mobile sink can help eliminate the hotspot effect in the vicinity of the sink, which can balance the traffic load in the network and thus improve the network performance. Location‐based routing is an effective routing paradigm for supporting sink mobility in WSNs with mobile sinks (mWSNs). To support efficient location‐based routing, scalable location service must be provided to advertise the location information of mobile sinks in an mWSN. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical location service for supporting location‐based routing in mWSNs. The proposed location service divides an mWSN into a grid structure and exploits the characteristics of static sensors and mobile sinks in selecting location servers. It can build, maintain, and update the grid‐spaced network structure via a simple hashing function. To reduce the location update cost, a hierarchy structure is built by choosing a subset of location servers in the network to store the location information of mobile sinks. The simulation results show that the proposed location service can significantly reduce the communication overhead caused by sink mobility while maintaining high routing performance, and scales well in terms of network size and sink number. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis and Comparison of Location Strategies for Reducing Registration Cost in PCS Networks

In mobile environments, a personal communication service (PCS) network must keep track of the location of each mobile user in order to correctly deliver calls. A basic scheme used in the standard IS-41 and GSM protocols is to always update the location of a mobile user whenever the mobile user moves to a new location. The problem with this approach is that the cost of location update operations is very high especially when the mobile user moves frequently. In recent years, various location management strategies for reducing the location update cost have been proposed. However, the performance issue of these proposed algorithms remains to be investigated. In this paper, we develop two Markov chains to analyze and compare the performance of two promising location update strategies, i.e., the two location algorithm (TLA) and the forwarding and resetting algorithm (FRA). By utilizing the Markov chain, we are able to quickly answer what-if questions regarding the performance of PCS networks under various workload conditions and also identify conditions under which one strategy can perform better than the others. Using the cost due to location update and search operations between two successive calls to a mobile user as a performance measure, we show that when the mobile user exhibits a high degree of locality and the mobile user's call-to-mobility ratio (CMR) is low, TLA can significantly outperform both FRA and IS-41. On the other hand, when CMR is high, FRA is the winner. Furthermore, unlike TLA which may perform worse than IS-41 at high CMR values, FRA at identified optimal conditions can always perform at least as good as IS-41, suggesting that FRA over TLA should be used as a generic scheme in reducing the location cost in the PCS network to cover all possible per-user CMR values.     

A novel distributed dynamic location management scheme for minimizing signaling costs in Mobile IP

Mobile IP is a simple and scalable global mobility solution. However, it may cause excessive signaling traffic and long signaling delay. Mobile IP regional registration is proposed to reduce the number of location updates to the home network and to reduce the signaling delay. This paper introduces a novel distributed and dynamic regional location management for Mobile IP where the signaling burden is evenly distributed and the regional network boundary is dynamically adjusted according to the up-to-date mobility and traffic load for each terminal. In our distributed system, each user has its own optimized system configuration which results in the minimal signaling traffic. In order to determine the signaling cost function, a new discrete analytical model is developed which captures the mobility and packet arrival pattern of a mobile terminal. This model does not impose any restrictions on the shape and the geographic location of subnets in the Internet. Given the average total location update and packet delivery cost, an iterative algorithm is then used to determine the optimal regional network size. Analytical results show that our distributed dynamic scheme outperforms the IETF Mobile IP regional registration scheme for various scenarios in terms of reducing the overall signaling cost.     

A user pattern learning strategy for managing users' mobility in UMTS networks

Third-generation mobile systems provide access to a wide range of services and enable mobile users to communicate regardless of their geographical location and their roaming characteristics. Due to the growing number of mobile users, global connectivity, and the small size of cells, one of the most critical issues regarding these networks is location management. In recent years, several strategies have been proposed to improve the performance of the location management procedure in 3G mobile networks. In this paper, we present a user pattern learning strategy (UPL) using neural networks to reduce the location update signaling cost by increasing the intelligence of the location procedure in UMTS. This strategy associates to each user a list of cells where she is likely to be with a given probability in each time interval. The implementation of this strategy has been subject to extensive tests. The results obtained confirm the efficiency of UPL in significantly reducing the costs of both location updates and call delivery procedures when compared to the UMTS standard and with other strategies well-known in the literature.     

Effect of personal mobility management in mobile communication networks

Personal mobility (PM) is one of the key issues in realizing a personal communications service (PCS) in emerging third-generation mobile communication networks such as IMT-2000. It can be realized through the universal personal telecommunication (UPT) service. Two PM management schemes are proposed to manage PM information related to UPT users for incoming call (incall) registration/deregistration, incall registration reset by a mobile terminal (MT) owner, and incall delivery to UPT users in mobile communication networks based on the location information managed by the user's home network. The relative cost, i.e., the ratio of cost per unit time for supporting both terminal mobility (TM) and PM management to that of TM management, is derived, and the effect of PM management is analyzed from the aspects of update or query cost, signaling delivery cost, and processing cost. These results can be utilized in the implementation of PM management in IMT-2000.     

Mitigating location management traffic via aggregation in multi-hop cellular networks

In high mobility areas such as shopping malls and transportation stations, mobile users tend to move in and out in a bursty fashion, and hence location update (LU) and paging signaling cause substantial traffic burden to the cellular networks, leading to signaling congestion. This poses a great challenge to the system design for wireless cellular systems. Traditional cellular systems cannot cope with this situation very well. However, with the ad hoc operational mode recently introduced into the cellular systems, the added multi-hop relaying via mobile devices provides a new way to mitigate location management traffic. In this paper, based on this new architecture, we propose a novel scheme, called aggregative location management, which aggregates multiple location updates into group location updates. For the scenarios of high capacity transit (HCT) systems, we use this grouping scheme to alleviate the signaling traffic when mobile users in an HCT move into new location areas. For other scenarios with mass arrivals of LU requests, we develop a generic aggregative location management scheme in which LU requests can be first aggregated by designated mobile devices and then are periodically sent to the location registers. Performance evaluation is carried out and shows their significant effectiveness.     

Group registration with local anchor for location tracking in mobile networks

In mobile networks, the location of a mobile user needs to be traced for successful and efficient call delivery. In existing cellular networks, as a mobile user changes his/her location area (LA), a location registration request is sent to the home location register (HLR) to update the user profile to point to the new LA. With a large number of mobile subscribers, this conventional registration strategy will incur a high volume of signaling traffic. We propose a new location registration strategy, called Group Registration (GR), which efficiently reduces the location registration cost by reporting location changes to the HLR for multiple mobile terminals (MTs) in a single location update request message. Specifically, the IDs of the MTs newly moving into an LA are buffered and sent to the HLR for location update in the route response message of the next incoming call to any MT in the LA. An analytic model is developed and numerical results are presented. It is shown that the proposed GR strategy can achieve significant cost reductions compared to the conventional strategy and the local anchor strategy over a wide range of system parameters. Moreover, the GR strategy results in a much smaller call delivery latency than the local anchor strategy.     

Two-level pointer forwarding strategy for location management in PCS networks

For a IPCS network to effectively deliver services to its mobile users, it must have an efficient way to keep track of the mobile users. The location management fulfills this task through location registration and paging. To reduce the signaling traffic, many schemes such as a local anchor (LA) scheme, per-user caching scheme and pointer forwarding scheme have been proposed in the past. In this paper, we present a new location management scheme which intends to mitigate the signaling traffic as well as reduce the tracking delay in the PCS systems. In this strategy, we choose a set of visitor location registers (VLRs) traversed by users as the mobility agents (MA), which form another level of management in order to make some registration signaling traffic localized. The idea is as follows: instead of always updating to the home location register (HLR), which would become the bottleneck otherwise, many location updates are carried out in the mobility agents. Thus, the two-level pointer forwarding scheme is designed to reduce the signaling traffic: pointers can be set up between VLRs as the traditional pointer forwarding scheme and can also be set up between MAs. The numerical results show that this strategy can significantly reduce the network signaling traffic for users with low CMR without increasing much of the call setup delay.     

蜂窝网络中环状搜索移动性管理策略

位置管理是移动通信领域的一个具有挑战性的问题,涉及到位置更新和位置查找操作.在现行蜂窝系统的位置管理策略(简称"基本策略")中,一旦移动台越区,就需要进行位置更新.由于移动台的越区具有局部性,基本策略会造成系统资源的极大浪费.因此,降低位置管理的费用成为移动通信领域的一个研究热点.该文给出不需要进行位置更新的环状搜索位置管理策略(简称"环状策略"),并推导出搜索位置区平均层数的一个公式,然后利用这一公式对基本策略、指针推进策略与环状策略的费用进行了对比研究,得出:在一定条件下,环状策略的费用要比基本策略及基本指针推进策略小.     

基于多跳蜂窝网的组位置管理策略

提出了一种成组进行位置管理的策略,分析了彼此临近的移动台组成一个自组织网的基本网络模型,提出了向中继点注册,由中继点进行信令压缩,组成组控制信令,成批向网络报告位置的位置更新的策略;采用M/M/n/n模型具体比较了批处理方案与传统方案的性能,说明作者的方案不仅减少了移动台的发射功率,还大量节省了频率资源,增加了系统的吞吐能力。     

Movement-based location update and selective paging for PCSnetworks

This paper introduces a mobility tracking mechanism that combines a movement-based location update policy with a selective paging scheme. Movement-based location update is selected for its simplicity. It does not require each mobile terminal to store information about the arrangement and the distance relationship of all cells. In fact, each mobile terminal only keeps a counter of the number of cells visited. A location update is performed when this counter exceeds a predefined threshold value. This scheme allows the dynamic selection of the movement threshold on a per-user basis. This is desirable as different users may have very different mobility patterns. Selective paging reduces the cost for locating a mobile terminal in the expense of an increase in the paging delay. We propose a selective paging scheme which significantly decreases the location tracking cost under a small increase in the allowable paging delay. We introduce an analytical model for the proposed location tracking mechanism which captures the mobility and the incoming call arrival patterns of each mobile terminal. Analytical results are provided to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of the proposed scheme under various parameters     

Location update optimization in personal communication systems

Mobility tracking is concerned with finding a mobile subscriber (MS) within the area serviced by the wireless network. The two basic operations for tracking an MS, location updating and paging, constitute additional load on the wireless network. The total cost of updating and paging can be minimized by optimally dividing the service area into location registration (LR) areas. There are various factors affecting this cost, including the mobility and call patterns of the individual MS, the shape, size and orientation of the LR area, and the method of searching for the MS within the LR area. Based on various mobility patterns of users and network architecture, the design of the LR area is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. The objective is to minimize the location update cost subject to a constraint on the size of the LR area. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Enhanced distance-based location management of mobile communication systems using a cell coordinates approach

In managing the locations of mobile users in mobile communication systems, the distance-based strategy has been proven to have better performance than other dynamic strategies, but is difficult to implement. A simple approach is introduced to implement the distance-based strategy by using the cell coordinates in calculating the physical distance traveled. This approach has the advantages of being independent of the size, shape, and distribution of cells, as well as catering for the direction of movement in addition to the speed of each mobile terminal. An enhanced distance-based location management strategy is proposed to dynamically adjust the size and shape of location area for each individual mobile terminal according to the current speed and direction of movement. It can reduce the location management signaling traffic of the distance-based strategy by half when mobile terminals have predictable directions of movement. Three types of location updating schemes are discussed, namely, Circular Location Area, Optimal Location Area, and Elliptic Location Area. Paging schemes using searching techniques such as expanding distance search based on the last reported location and based on the predicted location, and expanding direction search are also explored to further reduce paging signal traffic by partitioning location areas into paging areas.     

A performance evaluation approach for GSM-based information services

The ever increasing diffusion of mobile communications will lead to massive mobile access to the Internet. The paper focuses on the wireless application protocol (WAP) for providing mobile information services, as envisaged by the personalized access to local information and services for tourists (PALIO) project within the fifth research framework of the European Commission. In particular, we consider a global system for mobile communications (GSM) network where WAP traffic is transported by the short message service (SMS) on specific GSM signaling channels. We develop suitable traffic models for both the WAP downlink traffic and the signaling traffic. An analytical approach is described that allows evaluation of the mean transmission delay of a WAP page. Finally, a downlink traffic scheduling policy is proposed in order to reduce the delay variance so that users experience a more regular traffic behavior (service usability requirement). The theoretical derivations for the GSM-SMS scenario are general and can also be tailored for other mobile communication systems. The study allows dimensioning of both the service and the downlink signaling traffic capacity in order to fulfill quality-of-service requirements for users.     

Resource-efficient network mobility support in Proxy Mobile IPv6 domain

The basic standard protocol for supporting network mobility (NEMO) (i.e., NEMO-BSP specified by IETF) introduces several performance problems, such as multiple tunneling overhead and packet delivery latency, because it exploits mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), which was proposed for host mobility. To improve the basic NEMO solution, two network-based NEMO approaches, rNEMO and N-PMIPv6, have been proposed. The rNEMO is able to reduce significant packet tunneling overhead. The N-PMIPv6, on the other hand, reduces location update cost, but it leads to packet tunneling overhead. Thus, they commonly waste network resources in both wired and especially wireless network. No efficient and practical solutions for minimizing both the location update overhead and packet tunneling overhead have been presented until now. This situation motivated us to propose a resource-efficient network mobility scheme (RENEMO), reducing resource utilization required for network mobility support. We show that the proposed RENEMO outperforms both rNEMO and N-PMIPv6 in terms of network resource.