A location management scheme to support non-geographic phone numbers in personal communications services

Abstract

Subscribers in future personal communications system (PCS) networks will be assigned portable personal numbers, or non-geographic phone numbers (NGPNs), which will not indicate the service provider and home location register (HLR) database: which serves the subscribers. A location management scheme for future PCSs based on a three-level hierarchical database architecture, which consists of a directory register (DR), regional location registers (RLRs), and visitor location registers (VLRs), is proposed under the assumption of local property in both called party distribution and user mobility. In addition to inherently providing non-geographic phone numbers, the proposed scheme reduces the number of database access attempts and the signaling cost for location management. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.