A Hybrid Replication with Forwarding Strategy for Location Management
by Baoshan Gu
 

A location management scheme in wireless networks must effectively handle both user location update and search operations. Replication and forwarding are two well known techniques to reduce user search and update costs, respectively, with replication being most effective when the call to mobility ratio CMR of the user is high, while forwarding being most effective when the CMR value is low. These two techniques along with others are developed based on the notion of per-user-based location management under which the best algorithm among all can be selected for execution by the system based on the user's CMR value. We propose and analyze a hybrid replication with forwarding scheme that can be uniformly applied to all users. In addition to having the advantage of uniformity, the hybrid scheme can take advantage of both replication and forwarding schemes. The system under this scheme uses the optimal number of replicas and forwarding chain length to minimize the total communication cost due to location update and search operations for a user. We use a stochastic Petri net model to help gather this information and show how the information obtained statically can be used efficiently at run time by the system to determine the optimal number of replicas and forwarding chain length when given a user's profile.