An energy-efficient system signaling control method based on mobile application traffic

The explosive growth of smart mobile user equipments (UEs) boosts the emerging of numerous mobile applications. Most of these applications require an always-online connectivity, which incurs overly-frequent Radio Resource Control (RRC) state transitions, leading to signaling storm and user access failure. To address this issue, many researches focus on avoiding frequent transitions between RRC states by maintaining UEs in the RRC connected state for longer time. However, these researches bring up substantial energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient system signaling control method, by which each UE adjusts its RRC release timer adaptively according to the traffic patterns of mobile applications. Numerical results show that in comparison to the conventional signaling control method, the proposed method can save 27.5% average energy consumption with well-controlled signaling load. Meanwhile, the disparity of user experience is significantly lower.