Paging Load Congestion Control in Cellular Mobile Networks

This paper addresses the requirement for a congestion control mechanism, in order to efficiently handle paging traffic over cellular networks. The standard simultaneous paging approach can easily result in congestion, for relatively small values of the offered load. Instead of differentiating paging capacity based on the incoming load, this approach is more oriented towards a limited-resource system. Considering that a paging channel usually experiences high and low utilization periods, it is proposed to differentiate the paging mechanism according to the processed load. Given medium or even mild overload conditions, several forms of sequential paging substantially decrease blocking probabilities, while presenting good delay behavior. Based on a queueing analysis, we are able to quantitatively estimate potential improvements, and point out the basic points of such an adaptive scheme.