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Location management in
wireless mobile network
By:Ali Bohlooli

Instructor: Dr Nasser Movahhedi nia

Research Week 2007
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Outline

Introduction to Wireless Mobile Network

Location Management Definition

Location Management Solutions

3
Introduction

4
Introduction

5
Introduction
key components
Mobile terminal (MT)
Base station (BS)
Mobile switching center
(MSC)
Home location register (HLR)
Visitor location register (VLR)
6
Introduction

7
Introduction
Mobility Management
location management
handoff management


What is location management doing?
location registration (or location update)
paging
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Introduction
Two standards for location management :
1. Interim Standard 41 (IS-41) (North America)
2. Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM )
Mobile Application Part (MAP) (Europe, Asia)

Both standards are two-level database hierarchy
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Introduction


Update and paging trade off




Location Area and paging Area
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Updating
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Time Based Updating

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Movement Based Updating
movement threshold of 3 is used
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Distance Based Updating

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Calling Procedure
Call delivery
1.Determining the serving VLR of the called MT
2.Locating the visiting cell of the called MT
(Paging)
Determining the serving VLR of the called
MT procedure
1.The calling MT sends a call initiation signal to
the serving MSC of the MT through a nearby
base station.
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Introduction
2. The MSC determines the address of the HLR of the
called MT by Global Title Translation and sends a
location request message to the HLR.
3. The HLR determines the serving VLR of the called MT
and sends a route request message to the VLR. This
VLR then forwards the message to the MSC serving the
MT.
4. The MSC allocates a temporary identifier called
temporary local directory number (TLDN) to the MT
and sends a reply to the HLR together with the TLDN.
5. The HLR forwards this information to the MSC of the
calling MT.
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Calling Procedure
Locating the visiting cell of the called MT
(Paging)
1.Polling signals are broadcast to all cells within
the residing LA of the called MT.
2.On receiving the polling signal, the MT sends a
reply which allows the MSC to determine its
current residing cell.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks
1. Pointer Forwarding:

K = 2 K = 2
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks
2. Local Anchoring:

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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
3. Pre-User Location Caching:

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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
5. User Profile Replication:
An MT's location is replicated at selected local databases
to facilitate call delivery.
When a call for the MT originates from the service area
of any replicated database, the call can be routed without
querying the HLR, thus reducing the call delivery delay.
However, each time the MT changes its location all
replicated databases need to be updated with the new
location, triggering a high location update cost, especially
for highly mobile users.
It favors users with a high call arrival rate relative to their
mobility rate.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
6. Hybrid:
The local anchoring and replication techniques are
integrated together to reduce the location tracking cost.
The VLR associated with the MT subscriber
'
s home or office is
selected as the local anchor where the MT reports its location
change. Meanwhile, the local anchor's location is replicated at
selected switches (called replicas) originating relatively high call
rates to the MT.
Only when the MT changes its local signaling transfer point
(LSTP) (MSC connects to the SS7 network via LSTP) region, its
local anchor is changed, which requires the updating of both the
HLR and the replicas.
The local anchor and replicas can supplement each other to reduce
both the location update cost and the call setup delay.
Compared to the IS-41 strategy, the integrated strategy always
results in a smaller tracking cost.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
Distributed database architectures
1.One-root tree structure:
The location databases form a tree with the root at the top.
Each database contains the location information of every MT
residing in its subtree. All non-leaf databases maintain a
pointer to an adjacent lower-level database regarding an MT's
location. The leaf databases acting like the VLRs in the
centralized structure contain the user service profiles for those
MTs within their respective coverage areas.
When an MT's movement or call is local, i.e., the MT roams
within the same or nearby LA or receives calls originating from
the same or nearby LA, the upper-layer location databases are
not accessed for the location update or call delivery. Thus, the
access burden on the upper-level databases is alleviated and
the end-to-end location update delay or call delivery delay is
reduced.
The drawback: the crash of the root may paralyze the entire
system and the root database may become overloaded as the
number of mobile users increases.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
2. Multitree structure:
The whole location database system is organized into a multitree
structure. which consists of a number of subsystems that assume
the tree structure and connect to each other only through their root
databases.
It overcomes the single point of failure issue in the one-root tree
structure, since each root only maintains the profiles for those MTs
residing in its service area and its failure does not affect the
operation of other database subsystems.
It is also scalable in that as the capacity of a root database is
saturated, a new subsystem is readily added while keeping the end-
to-end delays in location registration and call delivery unchanged.
It is suitable for global mobile systems adopting a nongeographic
personal telecommunication plan.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
Comparison to the 2 Database Architectures
Centralized structure
Advantages:
Easy adaptation to current PLMN networks.
The number of database updates and queries is relatively small.
Disadvantages:
As the number of MTs increases, the signaling traffic may degrade the
performance.
Distributed Structure
Advantages:
reducing the access burden on the centralized HLR .
Disadvantages:
The number of database accesses is increased.
No single scheme that clearly outperforms the others
under all system parameters
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
Location Update
The location update determine when or where an MT
should report its location to the network.
Static Schemes: e.g. IS-41.
A location update is performed when a MT changes its LA.
It cannot be adjusted based on the parameters of a MT from
time to time.
Dynamic Schemes:
It can be adjusted based on the parameters of a MT from time
to time.
Most of the recent research focus on the dynamic schemes.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
1. Profile-based:
The system maintains a list of the most probable LAs where
an MT may be located.
As the MT moves between the LAs in the list, no location
update is needed. Otherwise, the location update is performed
according to the IS-41 scheme.
When an incoming call arrives, the MT is searched from the
most to the least likely LA within its LA list.
This scheme requires that the LAs in the list be adjacent.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
2. Time-based:
A MT performs location updates periodically at given
time intervals.
The time interval could be predefined or dynamically
changed based on each user's location probability
distribution or the system load.
One drawback of the time-based schemes is the difficulty
of considering paging delay constraints while putting an
upper bound on the paging cost.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
3. Movement-based:
A MT performs a location update whenever it completes a
predefined number of movements across cell boundaries.
The MT may move back and forth between cells, thereby
triggering unnecessary location updates.
An improved movement-based scheme was proposed to eliminate
the unnecessary location updates, where when an MT revisits a
cell, the movement counter value is reduced to the smaller counter
value associated with the MT's previous visit of this cell. This
mechanism not only eliminates repeated counts of movements into
the same cell, but also counts out the movements since the last visit
to the cell during the same location update period. This makes the
movement counter reach the movement threshold more slowly than
in the basic movement-based scheme.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
4. Distance-based:
A MT reports its location to the network when its
distance from the last location update point exceeds a
distance threshold.
A mechanism to compute the distance between two cells
is required to implement this scheme.
A method was proposed to determine the distance
between two arbitrary cells in the hexagonal
configuration.
An irregular cell configuration would make the
implementation of the distance-based scheme
considerably more challenging.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
5. Group registration scheme:
Instead of sending individual location update requests to the HLR
upon each LA change, the new location of all newly moved-in
MTs to an LA since the last location update is reported to the HLR
in a single location update request, which is conveyed to the HLR
in the route response message of the next incoming call to any MT
in the LA.
Upon an LA change, a forwarding pointer is set up from the MT's
local anchor (which is pointed to from the HLR) to its current
VLR, so that incoming calls to the MT can be delivered before the
MT's local anchor is changed to its current VLR via the next group
registration.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
Terminal Paging
Search for and alert the intended MT of an incoming call.
1. Sequential paging:
The paging area is partitioned into several paging zones based on the user
location probability distribution and the paging delay constraint.
As an incoming call arrives, the MT is searched sequentially from the most
to the least likely paging zone.
If the MT is found in a paging zone, the paging process stops.
The user location probability distribution may not be readily available.
An intra-LA location update strategy was proposed to reduce the paging
cost. When an MT moves between its anchor cell, where it usually stays for
a long period, and the rest of the cells within its current LA, an intra-LA
location update is performed at the serving VLR of the current LA.
As an incoming call arrives, either the anchor cell or the rest of the cells in
the current LA is paged to locate the MT.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
2. Intelligent paging:
The physical information of an MT such as the most
recent interaction point and velocity can be exploited to
improve paging performance.
Paging related information is used to predict the most
likely where about of an MT and the MT is searched in
the most probable location first as an incoming call
arrives.
Other factors such as traffic conditions and the cellular
network topology may affect the accuracy of location
prediction, and consequently the effectiveness of the
intelligent paging strategy.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
3. Optimal paging:
The optimal search theory with discrete efforts was
applied for paging an MT.
An optimal multi-step search plan is developed in such a
way that the probability of detecting the MT on or before
each step is maximized.
The execution of the optimal search plan requires that the
system know the probability distribution of an MT in
each cell within its current LA and the probabilities of
the system failing to detect the MT on a single page in
each cell given that the MT is in that cell.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
4. Concurrent paging:
Multiple MTs can be paged simultaneously at different
cells within the same LA where these MTs reside.
An ensemble paging schedule should be designed in such
a way that the overall average paging cost is minimized
under the paging delay constraint.
Coordination among the pollings of the MTs should be
provided to warrant that each MT is searched from the
most to the least likely cell if each MT's location
probability distribution is known. Otherwise, some
heuristic algorithms can be applied to concurrently search
the MTs.
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Location Management for Cellular
Networks(Cont.)
Comparison to Static and Dynamic Schemes for
Update and Paging
Static (e. g. IS-41):
Advantage: Easy to implement
Disadvantage: It cannot be adjusted according to the parameter
of individual user.
Dynamic:
Advantage: allow online adjustments based on the
characteristics of each individual MT.
Disadvantage:
Some required information such as the distance between cells is not
available to the MTs.
Require significant computing power. Implementation of a computation
intensive scheme in an MT may not be feasible.
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Conclusion
There is no straightforward solution that takes
account of the multiplicity of location management
requirements
Various approaches from multiple angles have
been proposed to achieve advanced location
management towards a complete solution.
Each approach has pros and cons and is probably
not enough by itself.
Therefore, an accommodative and efficient
location management solution is called for by the
next-generation wireless system.
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