Communication characteristic-aware signaling traffic optimization method for mobile networks

The signaling traffic in mobile networks has been increasing rapidly due to the emergence of various types of devices such as smartphones and machine-to-machine (M2M) devices. This signaling traffic heavily burdens network controllers and could trigger network failures. Therefore, the need of a scalable device management method for reducing signaling traffic volume is increasing and the standardization activities have begun in 3GPP. The current mobile networks treat all devices as smartphones and frequently control the devices in a complicated way to provide advanced user experiences, such as seamless handover and longer battery life. This is a major cause of a huge amount of signaling traffic. However, M2M devices have different characteristics from those of smartphones, such as low-mobility, small amount data, low-frequency, and no power constraints. Therefore, a network does not require such a complicated management for M2M devices, and there is room for simplifying conventional control procedures. Moreover, smartphones often act like M2M devices (e.g. a smartphone is stationary when a user is in his/her home) and we believe a characteristic change aware device management method is necessary for further signaling traffic reduction. To achieve the signaling volume reduction, we propose 3GPP network parameter optimization approach in conjunction with 3GPP architectural enhancements. We evaluated the feasibility of the proposed method with a network simulator.