The impact of application signaling traffic on public land mobile networks

As mobile Internet applications supporting real-time communications services are pervasively used, traffic patterns in mobile networks have changed significantly. New mobile Internet applications differ from traditional applications such as web browser and FTP in that they need always-on connectivity and generate a large amount of signaling traffic. The traffic patterns of these new mobile applications lead to frequent change of radio resource control states between connected and idle in the user equipment, consuming device battery power and causing excessive signaling overhead. The growth in signaling has resulted in a traffic surge that has attracted the attention of mobile network operators. In this article, we first explore traffic composition in a 3G network and show that chatty applications such as instant messenger and social network services contribute to the frequent change of radio states. We then describe the mechanism behind the surge in signaling traffic and describe the disastrous outcome when an application server failure and recovery occurs. Lastly, we discuss some remedies to reduce the application signaling traffic and network load in 3G and LTE networks. These remedies include development of network-aware smart applications that consider the mobile network characteristics and introduction of push notification services. We also present related future work and our research directions.