Characterization of 3G control-plane signaling overhead from a data-plane perspective

In 3G networks, when user applications of mobile subscribers send or receive data-plane traffic, control-plane signaling messages will be triggered to initiate or release radio resources for the data transfer. Such signaling messages can increase the processing and transmission overheads of the 3G cellular network infrastructure, and this in turns degrades the performance experience of mobile subscribers. Thus, understanding the signaling overhead of a 3G network becomes critical. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive measurement study of the signaling overhead of a city-wide 3G operational network in China. Our main contributions are two-fold. First, based on real cellular traces collected from both data and control planes, we validate that by simply monitoring data-plane packets, we can accurately profile the control-plane signaling overhead due to the initiations of radio resources for data transfer. Second, using data-plane signaling profiling, we characterize the signaling overhead due to common transport protocols and network applications. Our measurement methodology and results presented in this paper would be useful for network operators to better understand how data-plane traffic patterns influence the control-plane signaling overhead of a 3G network.

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