Mobility database overflow control in 3G cellular networks

Abstract

In a 3G cellular network, the gateway location registers (GLRs), the visitor location registers (VLRs) and the home location registers (HLRs) form a three-level mobility database structure. When users leave a GLR/VLR service area, the corresponding records in the GLR/VLR are deleted. Due to mobility, a GLR/VLR database may overflow at some time periods when the number of visitors significantly increases in the GLR/VLR area. If the GLR/VLR is full, the registration procedure fails and the system cannot deliver services to incoming users under the existing cellular technology. We propose a hierarchical database overflow control mechanism in 3G cellular networks to effectively eliminate the GLR/VLR overflow problem, and incoming users can continuously use the service with insignificant extra overhead. An analytic model is proposed to investigate the performance of the hierarchical database overflow control scheme.