Location management in a heterogeneous network environment

In the context of heterogeneous networks and diverse communication devices, real person-to-person communication can be achieved with a Universal Personal Identification (UPI) that uniquely identifies an individual and is independent of the access networks and communication devices. In this paper, we propose two Location Management Techniques (LMTs) to support integrated personal communication services from heterogeneous networks. We first modify the existing HLR/VLR scheme with a Meta-HLR database to map a UPI to multiple HLR addresses. To solve the scalability problem in this centralized approach, we propose a shared hierarchical LMT that not only scales better but also takes into account of the locality of a user's call and movement patterns. The performance of these LMTs are studied via large scale network simulations.