A New Architecture for Converged Mobile Satellite Communication System and Terrestrial Mobile Communication System for Personal Communications

摘要

Location management is a critical problem when integrating the Terrestrial-Satellite heterogeneous mobile communication networks together. A good location management strategy can significantly lower the signalling cost and enable handover between the terrestrial segment and the satellite segment. A new location management architecture for converged terrestrial-satellite heterogeneous communication networks is proposed in this paper. This architecture is based on an inter-working function. With the inter-working function, the heterogeneous network can exchange location information between the terrestrial segment and the satellite segment.The problem of location area mismatch is also solved.