Optimization of OTT small data services: Network capacity and cost analysis

The popularity of smartphones and mobile applications has boosted over the top (OTT) services during the recent years, and this trend is expected to continue in the future. However, frequent connection reestablishments caused by OTT services which send or receive small amounts of data often lead to a heavy signalling load within the mobile networks. That has brought about signalling storm, which is a specific problem of mobile networks. It is mainly limited by the scarcity of wireless spectrum resources. Heartbeat mechanism is one of OTT services. Smartphones communicate with the mobile networks by the heartbeat mechanism to report whether they are online. Although heartbeat message belongs to small data services, it lead that users update their status frequently. The payload of update message can not be ignored. Thus, for OTT services such as Wechat, mobile QQ, the optimization of heartbeat mechanism has become one of the best methods to reduce the network payload. In this paper, we proposed a new concept visual user equipment (VUE) which can imitate some periodic information of user equipment (UE) and replace the UE to communicate with applications in the cable end. We also proposed a scheme to reduce the transmission of heartbeat signallings according to the state of OTT services. Under the same end-to-end payload condition our scheme has greater network capacity and higher throughput at the expense of a little rise in packet loss rate only when the arrival rate of service packets is high. On the other hand, our scheme can relieve the signalling storm of OTT services to a great extent.