| Next generation wireless networks are envisioned to provide global roaming and guaranteed quality of service (QoS) to mobile terminals carrying multimedia traffic. This demands developing effective techniques by which the mobile users can be traced so as to deliver services with the minimum resource consumption and processing latency. Efficient location management techniques, which consist of location update/registration and paging thus, become one of the most important issues because they deal with how to deliver mobile services with varying constraints. The objective of this study is to develop new location management techniques for delivering multimedia services in a massive mobile environment. First, a framework of user mobility profile (UMP) is proposed to capture a mobile user's characteristics including service and mobility pattern. Consequently, location probabilities of each user are estimated based on the mobile user's historic records and paths information. Then new paging schemes are developed to reduce signaling cost under delay constraint because the goal of paging involves setting up a call connection within a certain delay bound while consuming the minimum amount of bandwidth. Additionally, a dynamic location management scheme with the consideration of QoS requirement and mobility pattern is proposed to reduce signaling cost and improve system performance for inter-system roaming. In accordance with this scheme, a mobility application part (MAP) protocol is designed for location registration and call delivery processes to support the roaming capability of mobile terminals moving across different networks. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated over a hierarchical architecture, which is natural for mobile users with a wide range of mobility patterns. |
