A signaling load and radio resource utilization balancing scheme for 3G cellular networks

This paper proposes an optimal scheme to balance the trade-off between signaling load and radio resource utilization in UMTS networks. To efficiently use limited radio resource, 3GPP introduces RRC state transition mechanism in UMTS. This mechanism uses a timer called T_DCH to determine when mobile phone should release its connection to network. To examine the impact of such a timer on radio resource utilization and signaling load, which is seldom considered in previous literature, this paper proposes a system model to calculate RRC connection numbers, traffic channel utilization and control channel blockage rate of a cellular network based on different network configurations and traffic models. Moreover, an optimization goal is formulated to describe the trade-off between signaling load and radio resource utilization ratio. Based on convex optimization, an iterative algorithm is constructed to solve this problem. Numerical results show the availability of the model.