On-line profile replication for hierarchical mobility management in PCS networks

In the context of heterogeneous networks and diverse communication devices, real person-to-person communications can be achieved with a universal personal identification (UPI) that uniquely identifies an individual and is independent of the access networks and communication devices. Hierarchical mobility management techniques (MMT) have been proposed to support UPI. Previously proposed profile replication algorithms for improving the performance of such MMT are either threshold-based or off-line. In contrast to an off-line algorithm that assumes perfect knowledge of user calling and mobility statistics, we propose in this paper on-line replication algorithms that decide whether to distribute new replicas or delete existing replicas after serving each request, all based on the input sequence seen so far. The performance of our on-line profile replication algorithms is studied via large scale network simulations.