Design and Analysis of Algorithms for Efficient Location and Service Management in Mobile Wireless Systems

Mobile wireless environments present new challenges to the design and validation of system supports for facilitating development of mobile applications. This dissertation concerns two major system-support mechanisms in mobile wireless networks, namely, location management and service management. We address this research issue by considering three topics: location management, service management, and integrated location and service management.

A location management scheme must effectively and efficiently handle both user location-update and location-search operations. We first quantitatively analyze a class of location management algorithms and identify conditions under which one algorithm may perform better than others. From insight gained from the quantitative analysis, we design and analyze a hybrid replication with forwarding algorithm that outperforms individual algorithms and show that such a hybrid algorithm can be uniformly applied to mobile users with distinct call and mobility characteristics to simplify the system design without sacrificing performance.

For service management, we explore the notion of location-aware personal proxies that cooperate with the underlying location management system with the goal to minimize the network communication cost caused by service management operations. We show that for cellular wireless networks that provide packet services, when given a set of model parameters characterizing the network and workload conditions, there exists an optimal proxy service area size such that the overall network communication cost for service operations is minimized. These proxy-based mobile service management schemes are shown to outperform non-proxy-based schemes over a wide range of identified conditions.

We investigate a class of integrated location and service management schemes by which service proxies are tightly integrated with location databases to further reduce the overall network signaling and communication cost. We show analytically and by simulation that when given a user's mobility and service characteristics, there exists an optimal integrated location and service management scheme that would minimize the overall network communication cost for servicing location and service operations. We demonstrate that the best integrated location and service scheme identified always performs better than the best decoupled scheme that considers location and service managements separately.