Two-level forwarding pointers-based cache scheme for location management in PCS networks

One of the challenging tasks in a personal communication services (PCS) environment is to efficiently maintain the location of PCS subscribers who move from one region to another (hereafter called mobile users). When a mobile user receives a call, the network has to quickly determine its current location. The existing location management scheme suffers from high signaling traffic in locating the mobile users. Two-level forwarding pointer has been proposed from a per-user forwarding pointer scheme to reduce the cost of signaling traffic. In this paper, we elaborate the two-level forwarding pointer scheme; we use the cache information that stored in a local switch to locate rapidly the mobile user. The analytical results indicate that our proposal efficiently reduces the signaling traffic cost for users without increasing much of the call setup delay