Facing the signaling storm: A method with stochastic concept

To keep “Always-on”, terminals contact with remote servers by sending the keep-alive messages (or heartbeat messages). Any message in data plan can be sent if and only if the RRC (Radio Resource Control) connection is built. Keep-alive messages are transmitted periodically, which leads to periodic establishment of RRC connections in some cases. High frequency of state transition may induce heavy burden in control channel in both UMTS and LTE network. Besides, it may also induce low efficiency in data channel in UMTS network. This paper presents a novel scheme to deal with these problems. Two new concepts, establishment probability “p” and “Rejected” state, are introduced to reduce the frequency of RRC connection establishment. Hence, the load in channels, especially in control channel, can be reduced to a low level. An analysis is developed based on queuing theory for the scheme and the performance is verified with simulations.