Intersystem location management based on user profile replication

Abstract

According as personal life becomes global and the demand for international roaming increases, it is very important to manage the location information of roaming subscribers efficiently. In case that a user requires location registration in the roaming network, many signaling messages and database accesses are involved in the intersystem location registration between home network and roaming network. Therefore, we propose a new intersystem location management scheme to replicate roaming user``s profile at mobility gateway. With the proposed scheme, the registration procedure at the roaming network can be performed between the roaming gateway and the serving MSC/VLR of the roaming network, and consequently both network traffic and database load can be reduced. We analyze the performance of the intersystem location management schemes in view of the intersystem location area and a roaming user. To show performance improvement, signaling cost, database access cost and registration latency are compared. From numerical results, the proposed scheme reduces the location management cost in the intersystem location area and is effective when most users located at system boundary move into adjacent network.