Fighting packet storms in mobile networks with information-centrism

Abstract

Mobile application development for smartphones is a trend in the telecommunications industry. However, their deployment is not seamless since many applications are not mobile network-friendly. A key problem that frequently arises is an excessive number of signaling messages, known as signaling storms. This leads to very high overhead and a decrease in operator income. We focus on this problem and propose an approach that is based on an information-centric networking deployment at the access network. We compute the number of signaling messages and derive the conditions under which our approach leads to fewer messages than the approach that is used in current networks. We also argue about the network and application layer modifications that are needed for the adoption of our method.