Implicit Deregistration with Forced Registration for PCS Mobility Management

Abstract

Registration/deregistration with a mobility database called Visitor Location Registers (VLRs) is required in a PCS network when a mobile phone moves between registration areas. Several schemes were proposed to deregister a mobile phone after it moves out of a registration area. A simple scheme, called implicit deregistration, is studied in this paper, which does not specifically deregister any obsolete record in the VLR. If the VLR is full when a mobile phone arrives, a record in the VLR is deleted and the reclaimed storage is reassigned to the incoming mobile phone. It is possible that a valid record will be deleted. If so, the VLR record of a mobile phone may be deleted before a call to the mobile phone arrives. Our previous work assumed that the incoming call setup would be lost. In this paper, we propose forced registration to restore the VLR record before the call setup operation can proceed. With this modification, implicit deregistration totally eliminates the deregistration traffic at the cost of creating some forced registration traffic.

We derive the record-missing probability and the portion of the network traffic saved by implicit deregistration. Our study indicates that implicit deregistration with forced registration may significantly reduce the deregistration traffic if the user mobility is high and the number of mobile phones in a registration area is not very large.