An efficient fault-tolerant location management protocol for personal communication networks

We present an efficient fault-tolerant distributed location management protocol for personal communications service (PCS) networks. It achieves low connection-establishment delay, and under certain conditions, low overall cost compared to the current PCS location management protocol (i.e., IS-41). It also effectively avoids the shortcomings of IS-41, namely, centralized location management and triangular routing. Another feature of the protocol is its ability to recover from loss or corruption of the location information carried by the mobile host. For larger networks, this paper proposes two approaches to reduce the overhead of the distributed location management scheme. Further, we formally prove that our location management scheme maintains the correct location information of every subscriber in the system.