Reducing registration traffic for multitier personal communications services

This paper presents an architecture for the multitier personal communications system (PCS) and intelligent algorithms for mobility management (specifically, the registration procedure). The multitier PCS system architecture considered in this study integrates three individual tiers: a high-tier system, a licensed low tier, and a unlicensed low tier. These three tiers are integrated into a single system by using a single home-location register (HLR) or the multitier HLR (MHLR). Under this architecture, we describe a registration protocol, where the mobile station (MS) is allowed to register to the MHLR on only one tier at any given time. We propose several intelligent algorithms for the MS to determine whether to perform registration or not in various situations to reduce the registration traffic.