Mobility management for personal communications networks

Personal Communications Services (PCS) support the mobility of its subscribers. A PCS user can travel from one area to another while maintaining communications with the network. To ensure that incoming calls can be successfully delivered, the PCS network must keep track of the location of the mobile terminals (MTs). Based on the current location tracking scheme, each MT reports its location to the PCS network periodically and the network stores the user location information in a database structure. When a call for an MT is initiated, the network first determines the current location of the called MT by database lookup. A paging process is then used to determine the residing cell of the called MT. When communication is in progress, a handover mechanism is also needed to reroute the connection as the MT moves to another area. Mobility management involves the transmission of signaling messages through the wireless and the wireline medium. This signaling traffic may significantly degrade the performance of the PCS network as the mobile subscriber population continues to expand.;A number of mechanisms for reducing the signaling overhead for mobility management are developed in this research. First, modifications to the PCS signaling network architecture are studied such that the signaling overhead for location registration and call delivery can be reduced. Then, dynamic location update and paging schemes are developed which significantly reduce the wireless signaling overhead while guaranteeing pre-defined paging delay requirement. Finally, an anchor radio system handover mechanism is introduced which reduces the signaling and processing overhead for handover in personal access communications systems.