Modeling of Mobility-Aware RRC State Transition and Its Application on Energy-Constrained Signaling Reduction

For the coming 5th Generation, mobile devices are becoming more chatty due to the machine-type-communication and always-on applications. On the other hand, the densely deployed heterogeneous networks cause more frequent handovers. From the network's perspective, the increased amount of background traffic and handovers increase the signaling load due to frequent state transitions between idle and connected states. From the user's perspective, staying in connected state in long period of time results in higher energy consumption. To analyze the tradeoff between the connected and idle states, we develop a closed-form mathematical model of state transition process, based on the framework of alternating renewal process. The traffic-based and mobility-aware user-specific model enables various types of optimization with respective to reduction of signaling overhead and energy consumption. In this paper we apply the developed model to achieve minimum amount of signaling load by optimizing the inactivity timer, subjected to the energy consumption constraint.