Location Management

Lecture-5
Dr. Rahul Saha
Lovely Professional University
Definition
Location management is an important area of mobile computing. Location management in mobile
network deals with location registration and tracking of mobile terminals. The location registration
process is called location update and the searching process is called paging.
Home Location Registrar (HLR)
Search and update operations
 The location of a mobile node is maintained at the granularity of a cell, i.e., which cell the mobile node
was in when it last registered. For each mobile node m, the HLR maintains a mobility binding (m, c),
where c is the latest cell (location) of m known to the HLR. The location information of m in the HLR is
updated as follows:

 When a mobile node is switched on, the HLR is notified of the current location of m (the cell in which
the mobile node is located). The mobile node m’s location is sent to the location server. The
registration message travels via the base station of the cell to the location server.

 Whenever handoff occurs, the HLR is notified of the cell ID to which m is handing off to. When the
mobile node moves to cell d from cell c, the mobile node may decide to register its location to be cell d.

 To find a mobile node m’s current location, first the HLR is contacted. The HLR contacts the base station
of cell c in the mobility binding for m. The base station pages for mobile m in its cell. If m is in cell c and
is switched on, then it can respond to the page message, and connection can be established.
What is cell
residency
time ?
Extended version of Location Management

Mobility Binding : last binding update time, time duration of binding validation

An expanded ring search : can be performed for a maximum of k rings centred at

cell c—the last known location of the mobile node.

Time-based updates, are an example of dynamic update schemes

Registration area–based location
management
Forwarding Location Pointer
A person X is basically from New York. The New York Controller maintains a register of X’s addresses.

X often moves to Texas for work but not with a fixed address. Texas also maintains s Texas Controller register.

How one can search for person X easily ?

 Without forwarding pointer

With forwarding pointer

Dynamic update schemes

 Time-based updates: periodically update of registration areas.

 Movement-based updates: A mobile node updates its location whenever it crosses a certain
number of cell boundaries M since it last registered.

 Distance-based updates: A mobile node updates its location whenever it moves a certain
number of cells D away from the last cell at which it last updated its location.

The maximum search area for paging depends upon mobility pattern and update schemes
 Caching of information
Call-to-Mobility
 
Ratio (CMR) =   is the number of searches, is the number of updates

Average number of search operations between two consecutive update operations

In the per-user location-caching scheme, the cache is maintained with location registrars. In this case,
the call frequency fs is the aggregate frequency of calls originating from a registration area for a particular
mobile node because once the location of a particular mobile node is cached, it can be used to eliminate
(reduce) the search cost for any subsequent search operation before the next move. Thus the search
latency of all the calls for a particular mobile node m originating from the RA whose location registrar
caches m’s location is reduced.
 A lazy cache maintenance scheme was used because the stale cached information was not updated
until it was required. Latency is more.

 Eager cache maintenance achieves this by maintaining a list of registrars that are currently caching
the location information of mobile node m. This update list of m can be maintained at the current
local registrar of m. Whenever m moves to another RA, all the registrars in the update list for m are
notified of the new location of m. Eager caching decreases the search cost at the expense of
increasing the update cost.

 The working-set approach exploits this fact to adaptively maintain cache at only those registrars
where it will help in reducing the overhead of location management
Flat organization
Hierarchical (Tree) location management system
Integrated
location
management
and routing in
mobile IP