Location management and fault tolerance issues in mobile networks

Abstract

Mobile networks has become ubiqutous in todays life. The number of people using this technology is rapidly growing each day. The mobile population is expected to reach the figure of nearly 1 billion in the near future. Several research efforts are being undertaken to address various issues in the design and operation of mobile networks. Some of the active research issues in mobile networking include channel allocation, mobility management, signal processing, fault tolerance, routing protocols and interoperability between different mobile networking protocols. In this dissertation we focus on a couple of these research issues namely mobility management and fault tolerance. Mobility management deals with managing the mobile nodes when they move. The network has to maintain connection to the mobile node inspite of the nodes changing location. We develop fundamental bounds for load balanced location management. We develop novel algorithms for load balanced location management in mobile networks. We later derive fundamental bounds satisfied by any load balanced location management algorithm in the presence of failures in the network. We then present a fast recovery protocol to recover from failures in the network. The salient feature of this protocol being the removal of the use of wireless bandwidth in the recovery process. We conclude the thesis by discussing some of the future issues in the area of mobile networks.