Broadcast Approach for UMTS Mobility Database Recovery

The universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) provides high bandwidth packet data services to mobile users. To support mobility management, an MM context is established for every mobile station in its corresponding serving GPRS support node (SGSN). When the SGSN fails, all MM contexts in the SGSN are corrupted. These MM contexts must be recovered or data delivery to the mobile stations will fail. This paper describes a broadcast approach that allows the MS to detect lost MM context in SGSN and therefore speeds up the process for SGSN recovery. We propose an analytic model to evaluate the performance of the broadcast approach. The analytic model is validated against simulation experiments. Based on our study, the network operator can select the appropriate parameter values in the broadcast approach for various traffic conditions.