Smart-phone energy consumption Vs. 3G signaling load: The influence of application traffic patterns

The high signaling load in today´s UMTS networks has recently lead to severe problems and network outages of several hours, so called Signaling Storms. The reason is that certain network access patterns of popular smart-phone applications trigger frequent connection re-establishments, which are signaled to the network via the radio resource control (RRC) protocol. As a consequence of the network agnostic implementation of smart-phone applications, entities of the mobile network operator may experience overload, while energy consumption at the smart-phones is mutually determined. The aim of this work is to study the impact of traffic characteristics on the power consumption of the smart-phone and the signaling messages in the mobile network. For that purpose, we first develop a simple model for the RRC states of a smart-phone. Second, we estimate the resulting power drain and the signalling traffic of the smart-phone. Then, we investigate the applicability of our model by comparing analytical with simulation results for real-world smart-phone traffic measurements. Finally, we evaluate the effect of network parameter optimization on traffic with different statistical characteristics. Our counter-intuitive results show that in particular bursty traffic patterns are suitable for UMTS networks while periodic patterns may cause increased power consumption and signaling overload - in contrast to classical queueing systems.