Development of the Home Location Register/Authentication Center in the CDMA Mobile System

Abstract

In this paper, a home location register (HLR) for CDMA mobile communication system (CMS) is introduced. It stores the mobile station (MS) subscribers locations and supplementary service information. Call processing procedures for HLR are developed to receive and store subscriber's location coming from mobile exchange (MX) during the location registration, and to transfer subscriber's location and supplementary service information to the MX during the mobile-terminated call setup. For fast call processing by increasing database access speed, a memory-resident database management system is devised. For Easy and secure HLR operation, administration and maintenance functions and overload control mechanisms are implemented. Designed HLR hardware platform is expandable and flexible enough to reallocated software blocks to any subsystems within the platform. It is configurable according to the size of subscribers. An authentication center (AC) is developed on the same platform. It screens the qualified MS from the unqualified. The calls to and from the unqualified MS are rejected in CMS. To authenticate the MS, the AC generates a new authentication parameter called using shared secret data (SSD) and compared it with the other AUTHR received from the MS. The MC also generates and stores seed keys called A-keys which are used to generate SSDs. The HLR requirements, the AC requirements, software architecture, hardware platform, and test results are discussed.