Wireless mobile communication networks support mobile terminals (MTs) which are free to travel within a service coverage area. In order to locate an MT effectively when a call is initiated, several location management schemes are proposed to keep track of its location. Current methods being used in IS-41 and GSM MAP for location management pose problems such as an increase in signaling traffic in the network, a ping-pong effect and a bottleneck created by signaling traffic at home location register (HLR). In this paper, we propose a new location management scheme that is to reduce the number of location registrations at HLR by making the location registration at HLR unnecessary when an MT moves into neighboring registration area (RA) or when it moves back to the original RA from neighboring RA. Our scheme employs a centralized database architecture using the HLR/VLR concept as in the IS-41 and GSM MAP but alleviates the above-mentioned problems. Analysis results show that our scheme always outperforms current methods and shows an especially better performance at low CMR (call to mobility ratio).

The IETF Mobile IP defines two multicast options: remote subscription (RS) and bi-direction tunneling (BT). In order to synthesize the strong points of these two IETF multicast options, we propose a hybrid approach, mMOM, which selectively uses two IETF multicast options based on the mobility of mobile hosts. Whenever a mobile host requests its first registration to a certain foreign agent, the corresponding foreign agent starts the service using the BT option. Afterwards, if it requests re-registration to the same foreign agent, the foreign agent considers it to be relatively immobile and continues services using the RS option. We propose a new metric to compare heterogeneous algorithms. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms all others.