Garbage collection of forwarding pointers in distributed HLR environment

This paper studies the pointer forwarding scheme for mobility management in PCS. In pointer forwarding schemes, the original registration message to the HLR is eliminated. Instead, a pointer is constructed at the old VLR to point to the new VLR. When a call arrives, HLR locates the current VLR by tracing the pointers. Pointer forwarding scheme do not reclaim the obsolete pointers based on the assumption that VLR's can have enough storage space. This paper extends the pointer forwarding scheme by proposing the garbage collection mechanism.