Eliminating Tromboning Mobile Call Setup for International Roaming Users

Abstract

Existing mobile service providers allow their customers to receive telecommunications services when they roam to other countries. However, in the standard mobile call setup procedure, a call from the visited country to a roaming customer at that country results in two international calls. This phenomenon is referred to as the tromboning effect. In this paper, we propose a third-party solution that resolves the tromboning problem by replacing two international calls with two local calls. Besides huge saving in voice/data path, analytic modeling and simulation experiments indicate that our solution is effective in call setup signaling. Also, our solution does not need to modify the existing mobile telecommunications systems.