An efficient location management scheme based on replication strategy for intersystem roaming in mobile wireless networks

Given the increasing demand for international roaming, it is very important to manage the location of roaming subscribers efficiently and cost-effectively. When a mobile user requires location registration in a roaming network, many signaling messages are involved in the intersystem location management between the home and the roaming networks. This complicated signaling procedure may cause roaming latency and the drop of active calls. We propose a new intersystem location management scheme, based on the replication of roaming users’ profiles at a mobility gateway. This approach effectively reduces the signaling overhead and maintains compatibility with existing protocols for mobility management. The analysis results show that our proposed scheme is able to reduce intersystem location registration cost and total signaling cost up to 40% and 10%, respectively.