Improving session continuity through user mobility tracking for EPS inter-serving gateway handover

  • Authors:

  • Sok-Ian Sou;Jeu-Yih Jeng;Phone Lin

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC;Customer Service Information Technology Laboratory, Telecommunication Laboratories, Chunghwa Telcom Co., Ltd., ROC;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

  • Venue:
  • Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The Evolved Packet System (EPS) is standardized to support a common IP-based core network with heterogeneous radio accesses in the latest 3GPP release. In the EPS, the Policy and Charging Control (PCC) framework provides dynamic policy control combined with real-time charging management. Long core network signaling for PCC degrades session continuity performance during handover. In this paper, we investigate the handover for an EPS session. Based on the results, we propose a proactive scheme along with a user mobility tracking model to improve session continuity. More specifically, our proposed scheme attempts to reduce PCC reauthorization signaling delay during the handover procedure. Then, we formulate a Markov process to model the user mobility pattern and to derive the session continuity probability. Numerical results show that our scheme can significantly keep the session continuity at a user acceptable level even when the mobility pattern is high. We also provide guidelines for operators to set up the network configuration parameters according to various traffic conditions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.