Location management in wireless ATM customer premises networks

The introduction of the ATM technology in wireless CPN environments necessitates the design of mobility protocols, since B-ISDN signaling was not developed to support terminal movement. The functionality of mobility protocols consists of the procedures for handover (rerouting of active data connections to a new cell) and for location management (tracking the exact location of a mobile terminal that moves inside a network). Considerable work has been done worldwide for both procedure types. This paper focuses on the location management techniques, and introduces a new mechanism suitable for large private wireless ATM environments, where the switches are interconnected with the PNNI protocol(Private Network to Network Interface). An analytical model has been developed to evaluate the eeciency of this mechanism. The development of Location Management (LM) protocols for Wireless ATM (WATM) Customer Premises Networks (CPN) environments has been lately an important research topic. In this type of environments it is necessary to design a Location Update and a Location Inquiry (or Location Tracking) mechanism. Location Update is the procedure of updating the appropriate network components about the current location of Mobile Terminals (MTs) when they move to diierent cell areas. Location Inquiry is the procedure executed by a network component to determine the exact location of a MT to deliver an incoming call or any other service. A LM mechanism must meet several requirements Por97], Rau97]. Firstly, a LM mechanism should be scalable in order to handle eeciently a large number of MTs moving inside public and private networks. Furthermore, a user should not be aware of the actions taken by a LM mechanism, while at the same time provision is needed to preserve location and user conndentiality. Another important issue is that, optimum paths for data connections should be established, after a call delivery, for the eecient management of network resources. Moreover, a LM mechanism should take into consideration the existence of switches that do not support mobility procedures. Finally, the LM mechanism needs to create minimum signaling load and to require minimum modiications/extensions to existing signaling standards. All location management mechanisms developed until now attempt to satisfy the aforemen-tioned requirements and can be classiied in two categories: 1. Location Register Schemes: Location registers (databases) are used to store the location of mobile users and use this information whenever a call has to be delivered to a MT. 2. Mobile P-PNNI Schemes: New features are added in the PNNI protocol …