Design and Evaluation of a Fault-Tolerant Distributed Location Management Method in Mobile Environments

One of the main chalenges in personal communication services (PCS) is to locate many mobile terminals that may move frequently from place to place. Such a system operation is called location management. Many network signaling traffic, and database queries are required to achieve such a task. Several strategies have been proposed to improve the efficiency of location management. These strategies use location register databases to store the current location on mobile terminals, and are vulnerable to failure of the location registers. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant pointer forwarding with distributed home location register (FT-RFDHLR) to tolerate the failure of location registers. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by an analytical model, and is compared with thew pointer forwarding with the single home location register (PFSHLR), the pointer forwarding with distributed home location register (PFDHLR), Biaz's bypass forwarding strategy (BFS) and two-path forwarding strategy (TPFS).