Smart-phone energy consumption Vs. 3G signaling load: The influence of application traffic patterns

The high signaling load in today's UMTS networks has recently lead to severe problems and network outages of several hours, so called Signaling Storms. The reason is that certain network access patterns of popular smart-phone applications trigger frequent connection re-establishments, which are signaled to the network via the radio resource control (RRC) protocol. As a consequence of the network agnostic implementation of smart-phone applications, entities of the mobile network operator may experience overload, while energy consumption at the smart-phones is mutually determined. The aim of this work is to study the impact of traffic characteristics on the power consumption of the smart-phone and the signaling messages in the mobile network. For that purpose, we first develop a simple model for the RRC states of a smart-phone. Second, we estimate the resulting power drain and the signalling traffic of the smart-phone. Then, we investigate the applicability of our model by comparing analytical with simulation results for real-world smart-phone traffic measurements. Finally, we evaluate the effect of network parameter optimization on traffic with different statistical characteristics. Our counter-intuitive results show that in particular bursty traffic patterns are suitable for UMTS networks while periodic patterns may cause increased power consumption and signaling overload - in contrast to classical queueing systems.