A Handset-Based Solution for Reducing International Roaming Costs

Abstract

Today's mobile service providers allow their users to receive telecom services when they roam to other countries. However, international roaming is very expensive. In the standard mobile call setup procedure, a call from the visited country to a roaming user in that country results in two international calls. This phenomenon is referred to as the tromboning effect. Several third-party solutions have been proposed to resolve the tromboning problem by replacing two international calls with two local calls. These solutions require one or more gateways for call re-routing. This paper proposes a handset-based solution that does not need to add/modify network nodes in the existing mobile telecom systems. Analytic modeling and simulation experiments indicate that our solution is effective in international trunk elimination and call setup signaling.