A Selective Pointer Forwarding Strategy for Location Tracking in Personal Communication Systems
Abstract: Location management is important to effectively keep track
of mobile terminals with reduced signal flows and database queries. A system
with single home location register and pointer forwarding is assumed. A mobile
terminal is assumed to have memory to store the IDs of visitor location registers
(VLRs) each of which has the forwarding pointer to identify its current location.
To obtain the registration point which minimizes the database access and signaling
cost from the current time to the time of power-off probabilistic dynamic programming
formulation is presented. A Selective Pointer Forwarding scheme is proposed
which is based on one-step dynamic programming. The proposed location update
scheme determines the least cost temporary VLR which point forwards the latest
location of the mobile. The computational results show that the proposed scheme
outperforms IS-41, pure Pointer Forwarding, and One-step Pointer Forwarding
at the expense of small storage and a few computations at the mobile terminals.