A New LTE/EPC Control-Plane Based Transmission Procedure to Cope with Short Data Push Services
Abstract
The architecture and the protocols of LTE/EPC were designed to deliver high transmission rates with QoS requirements. In order to be able to guarantee different levels of QoS, each transmission is based on a bearer, which needs to be set up within the network. It then requires to store contexts in the various entities of the network and to set up several tunnels or connections both in the user and the control planes. This approach is, however, inadequate when considering a class of value-added services obedient to a "Short Data push principle". This category which contains, at least, very popular services like Short Message Service (SMS) and Twitter, or new ones like Machine-to-Machine communication services, represents on one hand a continuously growing part of the worldwide amount of data traffic exchanged and on the other hand is easily recognizable thanks to its specific traffic pattern. To allow LTE/EPC to conveniently cope with the sporadic nature of these services, we introduce a new procedure based on a set of simple messages to transport such isolated messages only in the control plane. We show that this procedure may generate additional signaling in some cases but is efficient as soon as the proportion of sporadic traffic is not negligible. We illustrate our approach in the case of the SMS which is emblematic of the targeted category of services. The proposed procedure is, however, generic and may be used for any type of sporadic traffic.