Location Management

Location management is a two-stage process: the first stage is to discover the current attachment point of the mobile user for call delivery, as shown in Fig. 8, and the second one is call delivery. The associated protocol deals with querying and storing information in location databases and sending paging signals to locate the user within the network. Key research areas are the design of database architecture to reduce query traffic, streamlining location update signaling, and terminal paging schemes. Figure 8 associates these research issues including the one on security with their respective location management operation. Since location management deals with database and signaling issues, many of the issues are not protocol dependent and can be applied to any of the mobile networks.