Auxiliary user location strategy employing forwarding pointers to reduce network impacts of PCS

We propose a per-user forwarding strategy for locating users who move from place to place while using Personal Communications Services (PCS). The forwarding strategy augments the basic location strategy proposed in existing standards such as GSM and IS-41, with the objective of reducing network signalling and database loads in exchange for increased CPU processing and memory costs. With the forwarding strategy, calls to a given user will first query the user's Home Location Register (HLR) to determine the first Visitor Location Register (VLR) which the user was registered at, and then follow a chain of forwarding pointers to the user's current VLR. This strategy is useful for those users who receive calls infrequently relative to the rate at which they change registration areas, It can be shown, under certain assumptions, that forwarding can reduce total network costs by 40-60% for users with call-to-mobility ratio below 0.5.