Performance Analysis of Location-Aware Mobile Service Proxies for Reducing Network Cost in Personal Communication Systems

We propose and analyze mobile service management schemes based on location-aware proxies with the objective to reduce the network signaling and communication cost in future personal communication systems (PCS). Under these schemes, a mobile user uses personal proxies as intelligent client-side agents to communication with services engaged by the mobile user. A personal proxy cooperates with the underlying location management system so that it is location-aware and can optimally decide when and how often it should move with the roaming user. We show that, when given a set of model parameters characterizing the network and workload conditions, there exists an optimal proxy service area size for service handoffs such that the overall network signaling and communication cost for servicing location and service operations is minimized. We demonstrate via Petri net models that our proposed proxy-based mobile service management schemes outperform non-proxy-based schemes over a wide range of identified conditions. Further, when the mobile user is concurrently engaged in multiple services, the per-service proxy scheme that uses a separate proxy for each service outperforms the aggregate proxy scheme that uses a single proxy to interface with multiple services taking their aggregate service characteristics into consideration.