Ensuring Service Resilience in the EPS: MME Failure Restoration Case

In the Evolved Packet System, service resiliency can be heavily impacted by a node failure in its control plane. Ensuring service resiliency in EPS via defining efficient and proactive restoration mechanisms is of vital importance. In this paper, we address the case of MME failure. We propose schemes for MME failure detection and restoration considering both UEs in idle mode and UEs in active mode. As a MME failure may concern a potential number of UEs, network overload control, via randomized paging and handling signaling messages in bulk, is considered. The proposed schemes are evaluated through simulations and encouraging results are obtained.