Comparison of MME Signaling Loads for Long-Term-Evolution Architectures

The LTE architecture consists of eNBs that provide wireless connectivity to each UE, S-GWs that anchor the user plane for mobility, MMEs that provide control-plane support to each UE in its domain such as handover, paging, bearer management and tracking area updates and finally, PDNs that bridge the cellular network to the Internet. In this paper, we investigate LTE architectures with distributed MMEs and with a centralized MME. We present an analysis of the signaling load performance at the MME serving multimedia-capable UEs and compare the performance under both architectures. We propose a multicast paging procedure to alleviate the MME signaling load and compare the MME performance with multicast and unicast paging procedures. Our results show significant benefits of multicasting.