Signaling: The Good and the Bad
When we hear about signaling and the signaling storm, we instantly think about all of the negative aspects of signaling and the costs of supporting signaling traffic in the network. However, not all signaling is “bad” traffic.
Bad News First
Radio Access Network (RAN) signaling can be considered the “bad” kind of signaling. These messages are only for establishing an Internet connection so that the data itself can reach the device.
Revenues for connections themselves are very small, yet the amount of signaling messages required to establish and then release the connection is significant.
For example, when a subscriber wishes to connect to the Internet and download an email, 50 or more signaling messages traverse back and forth between the RAN and the Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN). Now consider a subscriber who connects to Facebook and plans on staying logged into the account all day. The service provider, though, does not maintain the Internet connection all day. Instead, the connection ends after the initial data is sent and received. The device will then reestablish the data connection seconds later, poll the Facebook server for updates, and release the connection – requiring another round of RAN signaling messages.
Let’s assume that the connection required 50 signaling messages for setup and tear down (a conservative number). At a cycle of every 2 seconds, that's 1500 messages an hour, 36000 messages a day. Multiply this number by 10 million subscribers and we are talking about 360,000,000,000 signaling messages in a single day!
Yes, There Is “Good” Signaling
Diameter signaling
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