[bogomipz]

Carriers do maintain sessions centrally though. These are the HLR and VLR - home location register and visitor location register. This is how "hand offs" between towers work. Handsets don't authenticate to the base station, the base station proxies those back to the MSC, mobile switching center and are looked up in the EIR - Equipment Identity Register.

[eropple]

Do you happen to know of a good breakdown of how mobile networks work? I'd love to know more, but it's hard to get a handle on it to get started.

[bogomipz]

Sure:

Its helpful to understand the history of mobile/wireless I think since the Telecom industry takes acronyms to an insane level. The terminology changes slightly depending on which generation of mobile is being discussed. This is a good breakdown of the evolution of mobile networks. I think its a good starting point:

http://www1.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/~wongtc/EE5406-Network-Archite...

This is a good resource for understanding more recent and relevant mobile architecture. This has a lot more detail:

http://www.slideshare.net/abhishekshringi/gsm-architecture-1...

If you really want to learn mobile and wireless networking, this is unbeatable and very thorough, I highly recommend it, grab a used copy.

https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Communications-Andreas-F-Mol...

If you just want the 10K view see:

http://www.telecomspace.com/gsm.html

[eropple]

Guess I've got some reading ahead of me. Thanks!