Flat Location Management Scheme for PCNs

This paper presents a “flat” mobile location management scheme for Personal Communication Networks (PCNs) with the goal of reducing both mobile tracking and location costs. Mobile tracking costs are reduced by the use of one-level tracking for mobiles in their “home area”, and a two-level tracking approach for mobiles visiting other areas. Mobile location costs are reduced by using an improved mobile location strategy, which requires a one-hop message exchange for mobiles in their home area, and a two-hop message exchange for mobiles visiting other areas. Analytical models are set up to analyze the performance of the flat scheme, and compare it with that of the other approaches. The measures of comparison used are the computation cost (database accesses), the communication cost (signaling messages), the average total cost, and the mobile location cost (call setup delay). For all these measures, the proposed flat scheme performs better than the location management scheme defined in the IS-41 standard. Results also show that for medium and high values of call-to-mobility ratio (> 0.07, i.e., less than 14 moves per call), the flat scheme performs better than other approaches proposed in the literature.