Request GSM/UMTS Location Update in Android

Question

Let me summarize my problem and what I would like to achieve.

I have a SonyEricsson X10i phone with Android 2.3.3. I realized that sometimes my phone not receiving calls even if it indicating full coverage. I checked myself in the MSC/VLR and it indicates that I registered and my phone is currently active (and also there is no IMSI DETACH flag), so it should working correctly (only the last Activate Date is a little bit old ~couple of hours, which can be good as well, without SMS/Call/Location Update), as I mentioned before the phone indicates full coverage and it seems it’s on the network. But when I tried to call it I only reached the Voice Mail. In the MSC/VLR I see No Paging Response Cause for the call, but the phone does nothing. I tried with other SW version (4.0.3 ICS), but the same result. But I not noticed similar behaviour with a different handset (same type). Sorry for the long summary.

So because what I described above, I ‘m trying to write an application/service which will perform GSM/UMTS location update in 15-20 minutes, but I couldn’t find any kind of procedure in android.telephony.gsm.GsmCellLocation, android.telephony.TelephonyManager which will do this for me.
My other concern is the getState()/setStateOutOfService()/ setState() procedures from ServiceState class… It seems they not really working. For example, when I first call the getState() I always get back STATE_OUT_OF_SERVICE, which is not true… When I’m set the state to STATE_POWER_OFF or STATE_IN_SERVICE, at least I get back that state from getState() afterwards, but the phone does nothing for that . (Not even indicate out of coverage,etc…)

Every suggestion/comment are welcome.

Answer 1

I have also seen this problem many times (2 phones from the same manufacturer as yours). From your question, I understand that you want to force the phone to send an MM periodic location update (which it should be sending anyway).

This is too low level, and there's nowhere you can force this directly in the programming interface. The mobility management procedure is part of the phone stack, and is specified in detail in 3GPP TS 24.008, available from www.3gpp.org. Paragraph 4.2.2 defines when the phone is supposed to send these location updates.

The only other thing would be to try by indirect means to force the phone into a condition where it would send a location update. You might be able to do that by trying to select another network manually. If it's successful, and you then manually re-select your home network, then you would trigger a location update. If it's rejected and falls back to its home network, then I think a location update would be triggered as well. But there would also be small costs to this - battery use while it does a networks scan, and time lost while it scans and does manual network selection. (My personal experience is that the lost calls don't happen often enough to justify this.)