Overview of Huawei Smartphone Solution

Reference Link: http://support.huawei.com/hdx/hdx.do?docid=SE0000750074&lang=en  ------> Solutions

Background:

Compared with feature phones, smartphones provide more powerful computing and network connecting capabilities. Smartphone operating system (OS) manufacturers provide a mature and open developing platform, multiple application distribution methods, and multiple charging methods. Therefore, applications for smartphones are developed rapidly.

However, as the number of smartphones on the network increases, the signaling load and traffic load on the mobile network increase sharply, and both the radio access network (RAN) and the core network (CN) become heavily loaded. Smartphones attract users and increase the revenue of operators, but also bring signaling impacts on the network.Huawei smartphone solution uses different control policies based on smartphone performance counters. This solution reduces the smartphone signaling on the network, reduces the network signaling processing consumption, avoids the device overload and network congestion, and improves the network usability and reliability.

Features of Smartphones:

• Always online

  After a smartphone is powered on, it automatically initiates a PDP context activation procedure and keeps an active PDP context all the time to access services at any time.

• Fast dormancy

  If no data is transmitted within 3 to 10 seconds, a smartphone will automatically initiate a radio resource control (RRC) connection release procedure to reduce power consumption.

• Platform and Service Heartbeat Messages

  A smartphone using applications and services sends heartbeat messages at a specified interval to notify the SGSN of its online status. Before sending heartbeat messages, the smartphone must have set up an RRC connection to the network.

• Push mechanism

  To ensure service delivery in a timely manner, many smartphone applications and services, such as emails and microblogging, adopt the push mechanism to promptly inform smartphones of new information. Before using the push mechanism, the smartphone must have set up an RRC connection to the network.

Solution Overview:

Figure 1 shows the mapping between functions in Huawei smartphone solution.

Based on the basic smartphone characteristics, Huawei smartphone solution provides the following functions:

1. Prohibiting the use of direct tunnel and inactive Packet Data Protocol (PDP) context activation,and enabling smart paging on the basis of quick smartphone identification.

   • Smartphone identification: identifies smartphones based on user behaviors or IMEI of terminals.
   • Smart direct tunnel policy control (smart direct tunnel and IMEI-based direct tunnel control): avoids impacts of smartphone signaling on the GGSN in direct tunnel networking.
   • Always online: reserves inactive PDP contexts of smartphones to avoid activation signaling of smartphones.
   • Smart paging: ensures paging processing of high-priority services and discards low-priority service data when the system load is high, to balance between experience of high-priority services and network reliability.

2. Providing abnormal activation signaling restraint: restrains abnormal repeated activation signaling of smartphones, reducing network capacity expansion, and ensuring that network resources are effectively used.

3. Collecting statistics on the traffic models of smartphone users based on specific types of terminals, to obtain smartphone performance counters for network evaluation and planning.

   • Analyzes the proportion of smartphones on the network, and signaling impacts of specific types of smartphones on the network.
   • Analyzes the traffic volume and traffic model of smartphones.