TABLE OF CONTENTS In this chapter, we discuss the basic ANSI-41 mobile telecommunications network functions related to automatic roaming. These functions are divided into the following categories: [1]
Mobile station (MS) service qualification
MS location management
MS state management
HLR and VLR fault recovery
We also examine the ANSI-41 application processes that support these basic network functions. While there are other automatic roaming-related processes in ANSI-41, as for authentication, voice feature support, and short-message services, we treat these separately in later chapters. This chapter focuses on the basic automatic roaming processes that allow an MS to obtain service in a visited system.
In the course of describing the processes, we identify the ANSI-41 mobile application part (MAP) operations (e.g., RegistrationNotification) used to accomplish basic automatic roaming process tasks. We summarize this information at the end of the chapter. Note that we employ the ANSI-41 convention for operation component acronyms; the Invoke component acronym is in all capital letters (e.g., REGNOT), while the Return Result component acronym is in all lowercase letters (e.g., regnot). Refer to the ANSI-41 standard for the descriptions of the individual ANSI-41 operations and parameters. Also, the reader should consult the Glossary for the description of general terms (e.g., serving system) that are not explicitly defined in this chapter.
Throughout this chapter we consider the serving system as a single entity encompassing the mobile switching center (MSC) and visitor location register (VLR) functional entities. This simplifies the descriptions of ANSI-41 application processes and also is...
