Performance Analysis of Profile-Based Location Caching with Fixed Local Anchor for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

Abstract

Although a lot of works for location management in wireless networks have been reported in the literature, most of the works have been focused on designing per-user-based strategies. This means that they can achieve the performance enhancement only for a certain class of mobile users with a specific range of CMR (call-to-mobility ratio). However, these per-user-based strategies can actually degrade the performance if a user's CMR changes significantly.Therefore, an efficient uniform location management strategy, which can be commonly applied to all mobile users regardless of their CMR, is proposed and analyzed in this paper. The motivation behind the proposed strategy is to exploit the concepts of the two well-known existing strategies: the location caching strategy and the local anchor strategy. That is, the location caching strategy exploits locality in a user's calling pattern, whereas the local anchor strategy exploits locality in a user's mobility pattern. By exploiting these characteristics of both strategies together with the profile management at the HLR (home location register), the proposed strategy can reduce the frequent access to the HLR, and thus effectively results in significant reduction in terms of the total location management cost. The analytical results also demonstrate that the proposed strategy can be uniformly applied to all mobile users, while always maintaining the performance gain over the IS-41 standard regardless of a user's CMR and the network traffic conditions.