Phone number portability for PCS systems with ATM backbones using distributed dynamic hashing

Current cellular subscribers have a geographic phone number (e.g., in AMPS and US digital cellular systems) or a number which contains the network provider's identity (e.g., in GSM), and whenever subscribers register or receive (and possibly, originate) a call, a home location register (HLR) database has to be queried. The wired infrastructure supports a function called global title translation (GTT) that converts the subscriber's number to an HLR database address. A special feature of next generation wireless access service will be to support personal communication services (PCS) and wireless subscribers with portable personal numbers, or nongeographic phone numbers (NGPNs), that do not indicate the service provider or HLR database serving the user. In addition, the GTT function may not be available when the wired backbone is an ATM network. Thus a key function required in future wireless access systems with wired ATM backbones will be the ability to translate an NGPN to the identity of the HLR which serves the subscriber, a process we call NGPN translation. We discuss the requirements of NGPN translation and some alternative schemes. We propose two schemes for fast, efficient, scalable and flexible NGPN translation which use ideas of dynamic hashing, caching, and indirection. The schemes use a hash function in the visiting location registers (VLRs) (or serving SCP) and a set of distributed translation servers which store the NGPN-to-HLR mapping. We discuss how the operations required to maintain the translation information can be performed. Finally, we perform a simplified analysis of the scalability of the alternative schemes as well as the hash-based schemes we propose.