Performance characterization of signaling traffic in UMTS core networks

Among the factors, which can affect the quality of service of the four different levels of the traffic classes differentiated by their sensitivity to the delay tolerance, signaling ranks on the top. There is significant signaling messaging activity in UMTS among core network elements, and between SGSN and UTRAN that needs to be characterized so that its impact on the application architecture could be determined, and appropriate hardware and service software architectures to support signaling could be developed. Signaling affects mobility management, session management, call setup, and teardown times, etc. thus affecting the QoS of applications. In this paper we first examine the resulting signaling load on a core and a radio access networks for a given traffic penetration in the packet domain by considering a signaling procedure "Attach" and then analytically compute the throughput and the latencies for other basic signaling procedures such as Detach, and the PDF context activation in addition to attach by considering a platform which can act as a signaling server for the RNC, the SGSN, and the GGSN.