The universal personal communication system (UPCS) is a system that enables anyone to communicate instantly with anyone else anywhere in the world. One of the crucial problems of such a system is locating hundreds of millions of moving portables in an efficient manner. The location registration strategy described is able to locate active portables automatically in the system with a small overhead in a distributed fashion. The system knows the exact position of an active portable in its service areas. The connection is set up by the system directly to its destination using the direct (shortest) path. The system capacity, efficiency, and inquiry time delay have been improved greatly compared to the leading existing techniques. It is shown that in the proposed system, the maximum database size is 0.51% and the database updating cost is 6.86% of that needed by a central database system under a specified scenario.>