A location management scheme to support non-geographic phone numbers in personal communications services

Subscribers in future personal communications system (PCS) networks will be assigned portable personal numbers, or non-geographic phone numbers (NGPNs ), which will not indicate the service provider and home location register (HLR) database: which serves the subscribers. A location management scheme for future PCSs based on a three-level hierarchical database architecture, which consists of a directory register (DR), regional location registers (R LRs), and visitor location registers (VLRs), is proposed under the assumpti on of local property in both called party distribution and user mobility. I n addition to inherently providing non-geographic phone numbers, the propos ed scheme reduces the number of database access attempts and the signaling cost for location management. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.