Global roaming and personal mobility with COPS architecture in SuperDHLR

Personal mobility removes the fixed association between a terminal and a user (a characteristic of traditional fixed and mobile networks), thereby adding one more degree of mobility on top of terminal mobility. Global roaming allows a user to roam in communication networks of different technologies. These two mobility options provide users with ubiquitous services across networks of different types. This paper identifies the technical challenges to achieving global roaming and personal mobility. We propose common operations (COPS) architecture to allow effective multiprotocol support and efficient protocol interworking among disparate networks and compare it with other approaches. SuperDHLR embodies the COPS architecture. It keeps track of user location, manages user profiles for multiple networks, and incorporates service logic for global roaming. It serves as a home location register (HLR) for wireless networks and a mobility management server for Internet protocol (IP) networks. SuperDHLR enables terminal and user mobility and facilitates seamless roaming across circuit and packet switched wireless networks, the Internet and wireline networks. (C) 2002 Lucent Technologies Inc.