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@  
— Increasingly becoming part of our lives
— A geographic region is divided up into interconnected cells
— At the center of each cell is a base station to which all the telephone in the
cell transmit
— All the base stations are connected to single device called an MTSO
(Mobile Telephone Switching Office) or MSC (Mobile Switching Center)
— Mobile clients may move within their current cells or move into other cells
— System needs to record the real-time location of a user while the user is
moving since other mobile clients may generate queries on the location of
the client
— may want to communicate with the client
— To efficiently manage the locations of mobile clients, V
 
are
defined
— hen the mobility of the client is high, the validity of data elements may
change rapidly with time, the data elements for the locations of mobile
clients are real-time data.
— On the other hand, the queries submitted from mobile clients are always
associated with timing constraints on their completion time.
  
   

 
— a geographic region is divided into
number of connected cells
— At the centre of each cell is a base
station or base supporting station
(BSS).
— The mobile clients within a cell
communicate through BSS through
wireless channels.
— Each BSS maintains a location
database.
— The location databases of
neighboring base stations are
organized into a hierarchical
structure.
î   
 

— There are two most common used architectures:

— Firstly, two-tier schemes-in which the current location of user is saved at two
network locations
— and secondly, a hierarchical distributed database where the whole space is
hierarchically decomposed into sub-regions.
3 
— Every user is associated with a Home Location Register (HLR).
— HLR primarily contains a location (zone) predefined for the user.
— henever a need arises to search the current location of user, its HLR is
queried.
— henever user moves to another area, its HLR is contacted and updated to
maintain the new location.
— An addition to this scheme is a Visitor Location Register (VLR) associated with
each user.
— VLR stores the current location of users which are not in their home location.
— If a mobile user  is at location, then on searching for its current location, first
the VLR of will be queried and then if not found the HLR of  will be contacted.
— henever, a mobile user moves from  to , its entry on VLR of  is deleted and
entry in VLR of is updated along with updating of location in its HLR.
Ñ
— maintain a tree-like structure
— Each location database at the leaf nodes maintains the location information of
users of a single zone.
— The information that is stored for a user is either a pointer to an entry in a
database at a sub tree (in case of internal nodes) or the actual location (in case
of leaf nodes).
— The databases are connected to each other through intelligent signalling
network like a common channel signalling (CCS) network.
— The type of location information maintained in the location database affects the
relative cost of search and update of the location information of users.
— It also affects the distribution of loads among links and nodes.
— hen a user moves from zone i to zone j, then updating is needed along path i
to LCA[i,j] and LCA[i,j] to j. (Least common ancestor)
— In a hierarchical database network, HLR is not used with any user. The user is
located by querying database in hierarchy.
— In worst case, entry for user is found in the root node.
r    
Ñ 
— It is proportional to the distance between the starting and the destination cells of
the mobile client.
— The mobility patterns of all the mobile clients should be considered before
constructing the location database tree.
— Leaf is the Ô
 
 

 of location databases and  
denoted as Ô
  
.
— Height of Ô
  
to the leaf nodes of the tree is denoted as V
 

.
   
3  
— Let the leaf location database
responsible for the cell be Ô 
.
— Œ
The distance between cells
and , termed as  
, is defined as
the height of the least common ancestor
of the responsible leaf the location
databases, that is
—  
V
Ô 
Ô 


— If  then  

— Let cc(x) be the cell in which mobile client
x is now residing.
— Œ
 The distance between
mobile clients and , termed  
, is
defined as the distance of the two cells in
which and is now residing, namely
—  
 






.
   
3  
— hile calculating the optimal value for distance threshold, we consider the
following related costs in location update and lookup procedure.
— CL: the cost of following a link in the tree of the location databases, i.e., sending
a message to the parent or the child node of location database;
— CU: the cost of database update;
— CQ : a database query cost
@    
     
  !"   !" 
   
  
 #î!!"  !"" #î!!"  !""  !"
 
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So, the total location update cost for x will be:
— 
 





x Ô 






 [2]



— Each element of the cover forms a cluster.
— The objective for finding a covering of the set of n cells is to get the minimal
value of num-crossing.
  | 
— Location management involves two operations,   and .
— henever a user   
 , a       is used.
— henever a mobile user      , the    is used.
— î  to store location information range between   :
— at ,     of location of a user is stored in 
    which     as only the local database
used to be referred.
— However the  
    as on every move of user, the
updating requires  
    .
— At the , no useful information is stored at any network location.
— Thus to locate a mobile user,   to be done  
 . However, in such a case,    as     

    $ 
r 
 
— %
— The flat search queries all nodes from root to the leaf.

— ^
— The expanding search queries first its home, then home¶s parent & then
all its children & so on.
— Ñ

— The hybrid search first performs expanding search and if the location is
not found then flat search is done.
Ñ
 
î
— The dynamic hierarchical database architecture    &
        for the mobiles with the help of Directory
Registers.
— This Architecture proposed [5] introduces  '   with the existing
   
Partition
— For each user, on the basis of locality of movement to avoid maintaining location
entries at all levels and thus reducing the search cost.
— The information whether the user is in current partition is maintained by a Leaf.
— To find the exact location of the user as it enables to decide which sub tree in
hierarchy is to be searched with flat searching.
— The update cost is increased however it also reduces the overall search cost as
compared to the flat search.
#

— henever a call is made, it is assumed that the information of the user will be
again used in further calls being made from the same region.
— Information about the user is cached at the VLR of the callee so that the
information could be used in further calls.
— So next time to locate the user, first the cache is being queried which stores the
information
— and if the location is not found at the cache, the HLR of the user is queried.
— 3 (    )
— ^  
— the cache is updated every time user moves

— * 
— The cache is updated only when there is a cache miss and move
operation.
— Performance study for lazy cache is presented in [2].

— #    +  
   

%  r  

— It is quite expensive to update all the database records that containing user¶s
information when the number of moves made by the user is quite large than the
number of his incoming calls.

— Forwarding pointer is used that points to the current location of user.

%  r  3 
î

— To avoid the cost of updating HLR and VLR both, forwarding pointers are set
from the VLR is used.

— From user x¶s previous location to its new location.

— henever, the user will be called, its HLR will be queried first to find out the first
VLR at which the user was registered

— A chain of forwarding pointers is followed.

— The length of this chain of forwarding pointers is allowed to grow up to a length
of k.
— In case of pointer loops back to its same location, then pointer compression
takes place.

— This approach is employed on per-user basis and so the cost of call operations
affects the particular user.
î 
    
  

— The total cost in locating new location of a mobile client is compared with
the total cost in locating a mobile client in old location

— Optimal distance threshold value is letting the cost for location update equal
to the saving in cost.
#|
'  3  
— The ratio of the number of calls for locating a mobile client over the number of
cell boundary crossing defined as
VV  V  
[3].

— CMR is an important factor affecting the costs for locating a mobile client and
location update.

— If there are not many location calls to a mobile client per cell boundary crossing,
i.e., CMR is small, then the generation of a location update from a mobile client
will not result in much saving in the cost for locating the mobile client.

— So in this case the location update must not be preferred.

— And if the CMR is large, the generation of a location update can reduce the
location cost significantly.
#     
 

— CL: the cost of following a link in the tree of the location databases,
— i.e., sending a message to the parent or the child node of location
database;

— CF: the cost of Forwarding a pointer.

— the cost of sending a message to an arbitrary cell for the case where the
system knows at which cell it is now residing;

— CU: the cost of database update;

— CP : the cost for polling for a specific client in a cell;

— CQ : a database query cost.

 #   

— hile locating the mobile clients it is important to consider the architecture of

mobile network which in turn affects the performance of the system and the cost
associated with the system.

— Different mobile clients have different patterns of mobility.

— Patterns may change gradually with time making it essential to maintain the
real-time locations, of mobile clients

— hen the mobility increases, the cost of locating the mobile clients become very
high

— Hence, the mobility patterns of the users in different cells should be considered
while organizing the location databases.
# ,
— The location databases should be properly organized, so as not to let the
location management cost go very high.

— The location update cost depends on the distance of the two cells.

— The cost of communicating with a mobile client is linearly proportional to the cost
of locating the mobile client therefore, consideration of the efficiency of the
proposed techniques is critical.

— These techniques are further enhanced with the use of caching, replication,
forwarding pointers and portioning.

— Continuous advancements are being made to develop techniques that are more
efficient, thus making the field of mobile computing an active area of research.
'

[1] Chen Jixiong, Li Guohui, Xu Huajie, Cai Xia, Yang Bing, ´Location Database
Clustering to Achieve Location Management Time Cost Reduction in A
Mobile Computing System´, IEEE 2005.
[2] Evaggelia Pitoura and George Samaras, ³Locating Objects in Mobile
Computing´, to appear in @  
    V

 


.
[3] Guo-Hui Li, Kam-Yiu Lam and Tei-ei Kuo, ³Location Update Generation
in Cellular Mobile Computing Systems´, proceedings of the 15th IEEE
International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium,2001.
[4] Guo-Hui Li, Kam-Yiu Lam, Tei-ei Kuo and Shi-u Lo, ³Location
Management in Cellular Mobile Computing Systems with Dynamic
Hierarchical Location Databases´.
[5] J. S. M. Ho and I. F. Akyildiz, ³Dynamic Hierarchical Database Architecture
for Location Management in PCS Networks´, IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Networking, 5(5), 1997.