Fwd: Location Area Updates missed during calls

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Luca Valtulina valtulina.luca at gmail.com
Fri Mar 21 10:10:53 UTC 2014


Hi holger,

What is a network-initiated Location Area Update? Do you talk about
> the NITB/BSC advertizing periodic updating?


With Location Area Update I refer to the Location Update procedure (I made
confusion with the UMTS protocol where "Area" has been added in-between). I
also have to apologies about that "network-initiated" which is clearly
wrong since is the MS which triggers the procedure by sending a location
update request signal (what I meant is that the T3212 timer is provided to
the MS by the network).


> > I find this behavior annoying mostly in scenarios where the T3212 (LAU
> > timer) has been setup to a low value.
>
> About which software and which versions do you talk?


mmm, I didn't quite get your question here.

After performing further testing I can wrap up the issue as following: when
a MS ends a call after the expire_lu time, it will be considered expired in
the HLR (because two LUs were missed by the network). When the (now
expired) MS initiates a call, the CM service will be rejected by the
network with cause 4 (GSM48_REJECT_IMSI_UNKNOWN_IN_VLR). Needless to say
that when a different MS tries to establish a call towards the (now
expired) MS, this call will also be dropped because the destination MS is
(seen as) detached from the BTS.

Now I think that if we want to have a more precise location management, a
lower expiration interval is a possibilities: this can be achieved by
either lowering down the t3212 value and keeping the same expire_lu
calculation (2 times t3212 + 1 minute) or by modifying the expire_lu
calculation. In this scenarios the issue described above is more likely to
happen (higher probability of having ~10 minutes calls than > 60 minutes).

So indeed, is this behavior expected by the GSM protocol? I think that
update the HLR whenever an MS exits a call will be a costless procedure
which can avoid the annoyance of having the first next call dropped if this
happens prior to the triggering of the LU by the interested MS.

luca
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