Impact of Signaling Storms on Energy Consumption and Latency of LTE User Equipment

Signaling storms in mobile networks, which congest the control plane, are becoming more frequent and severe because misbehaving applications can nowadays spread more rapidly due to the popularity of application marketplaces for smartphones. While previous work on signaling storms consider the processing overhead in the network and energy consumption of the misbehaving User Equipment (UE) only, this paper aims to investigate how signaling storms affect both the energy consumption and bandwidth allocation of normal and misbehaving LTE UEs by constructing a mathematical model which captures the interaction between the UE traffic and the Radio Resource Control state machine and bandwidth allocation mechanism at the eNodeB. Our results show that even if only a small proportion of the UE population is misbehaving, the energy consumption of the radio subsystem of the normal UEs can increase significantly while the time spent actively communicating increases drastically for a normal data session. Moreover, we show that misbehaving UEs have to spend an increasing amount of energy to attack the network when the severity of the signaling storms increases since they also suffer from the attacks.