A Location Management Technique To Support Lifelong Numbering in Personal Communications Services

Abstract

This paper presents a novel location management technique, HOPPER, that is designed to support in a scalable and efficient manner non-geographical (lifelong) personal numbers in Personal Communications Services Performance comparisons between our scheme previous schemes are derived from large scale simulations using a realistic trafc modeling framework for the ten largest cities of the United States. Results show that, in addition to inherently providing non-geographical numbers, the proposed scheme significantly improves lookup performance and requires relatively little database access and network signaling resources. 1 Introduction A Personal Communications Services (PCS) [3] network maintains per-user information about subscribers in user proles. A user prole contains information such as current location of the subscriber, authentication information, billing information, and other information related to advanced services such as call blocking, etc. User proles are stored in databases maintained by service providers. Subscribers are located in system-dened geographical areas called registration zones. Databases are assigned to serve zones and are connected to the wireline signaling network. When a PCS user makes a call, the network performs a location lookup to obtain from the callee's prole the current location of the callee and other information relevant to call delivery . When a user moves from one zone to another, the network performs a location update, modifying information in the prole to track the user's new location. We address the location management problem: efficient retrieval and maintenance of user proles concentrating on location information.