A novel location management technique for dualhomed UMTS cellular networks

Dual-homed (DH) UMTS networks (Fig. 1) are useful for handoff minimization, typically when the mobility of users is diurnal in nature [1]. However, if the conventional location management (LM) technique (e.g., IS-41) [5] be directly applied on such networks (the technique is named LM-DH in this work), it cannot make proper use of the additional connectivity for dual homing, resulting in no gain in terms of reduction in location update (LU) delay. So, in this paper, we propose a suitably modified LM technique (named LM*-DH) to taking advantage of the extra connectivity available in dual-homed networks with the help of a new location register (LR) entity, called dual-homed LR (DLR). DLR is co-located with Visiting LR (VLR) so that some of the global updates can be now locally handled by VLRs with the aid of DLRs.