A cost efficient location management technique for mobile users with frequently visited locations

Managing location information of mobile terminals is an important issue in mobile computing systems. Unfortunately, current standards of location management schemes, such as GSM and IS-41, behave inefficiently for mobile terminals moving between the same set of areas, or users tending to call and move in a fixed pattern. This is in turn results in a high location management cost. Several approaches have been proposed to tackle with this problem. One of the most efficient techniques is to replicate user profile according to the most frequently visited location areas. In this paper, we propose a new location management scheme based on replicated databases utilizing mobile stations to capture frequently visited location areas. We compare the performance of our scheme with that of GSM and other replicated databases location management schemes in respect of communication cost, database cost, and total cost. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better than other schemes.