UE-based network access timing control scheme for avoiding signaling spikes

The rapid growth of smartphone based User Equipment (UE) and the wide development of LTE networks have changed the traffic pattern of mobile applications. Today, many applications running on smartphones periodically generate background traffic by sending and receiving messages or retrieving updates (i.e. without user interaction). Since each activity requires the UE to first attach and then to detach from the LTE network, a large volume of signaling traffic is generated. When the timing of these activities synchronizes among many UEs, a storm of signaling traffic is caused. We refer to this phenomenon as a signaling spike. Such a spike is a serious risk for telecom operators as it may overload its gateways and eventually disrupt services. As a way to suppress these spikes, we propose a new approach called a user equipment based network access control scheme (UENAC). The aim of UENAC is to autonomously decentralize the access timing among of UEs by adding a variable delay before sending packets upon attachment to the LTE network. We implement the UENAC entity on a commercial Android smartphone and show that the scheme has no negative effect on existing applications with delays up to 8 seconds. Furthermore, we simulate the signaling traffic based on commercial traffic pattern and show that the proposed scheme is able to effectively decentralize signaling spikes.