Reducing Cellular Signaling Traffic for Heartbeat Messages via Energy-Efficient D2D Forwarding

Mobile Instant Messaging (IM) apps, such as WhatsApp and WeChat, frequently send heartbeat messages to remote servers to maintain always-online status. Periodic heartbeat messages are small in size, but their transmissions incur heavy signaling traffic to frequently establish and release communication channels between base stations and smartphones, known as signaling storm. Meanwhile, smartphones also need to activate cellular data communication module frequently for transmitting short heartbeat messages, resulting in substantial energy consumption. To address these issues, we propose a Device-to-Device (D2D) based heartbeat relaying framework, in order to reduce signaling traffic and energy consumption in heartbeat transmission. The framework selects the smartphones as relays to opportunistically collect heartbeat messages from nearby smartphones using energy-efficient D2D communication. The collected heartbeat messages are transmitted to the BS in an aggregated manner to reduce cellular signaling traffic. Based on the periods and the expiration time of the collected heartbeat messages, the framework schedules the transmissions of collected heartbeat messages to minimize signaling and energy consumption while satisfying time constrains. We implement and evaluate our solution on Android smartphones. The results from real-world experiments show that our solution achieves more than 50% signaling traffic reduction and up to 36% energy saving.