New Whitepaper! LTE Signaling Traffic: What's Really Going On?

For this third whitepaper Diametriq invited Randall A. Snyder to review the traffic model and investigate scenarios that highlight potential bottlenecks. Randy is the President of Wireless Research Services, LLC and a highly regarded authority in wireless signaling. The author first reviews the methodology of the model and then uses reasonable LTE and VoLTE subscriber forecasts and incorporates the new network elements provided in the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) architecture. The goal is to determine how much signaling traffic is generated, where that traffic goes, which events cause signaling traffic to be generated and draw some conclusions that might assist network developers and architects when launching new LTE networks. 

The white paper can be downloaded by clicking here: LTE Signaling Traffic: What’s Really Going On? 

Randall A. Snyder 

October 1, 2012

The Internet is teeming with discussions and assertions that the amount of Diameter signaling traffic generated by the 4G LTE wireless core network is significantly higher than analogous SS7 signaling traffic. But is this additional signaling traffic attributable to additional network elements involving the Diameter protocol or the impacts of changing user behavior afforded by the features of LTE? Using Diametriq’s Diameter Traffic Calculator™, which is based on the standard signaling message flows as promulgated by 3GPP, certain scenarios reveal network bottlenecks, the influences of user behavior on signaling traffic and places in the network where fine-tuning can mitigate excessive traffic.