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Instability in Distributed Mobility Management: Revisiting Configuration Management in 3G/4G Mobile Networks

Published: 14 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Mobility support is critical to offering seamless data service to mobile devices in 3G/4G cellular networks. To accommodate policy requests by users and carriers, micro-mobility management scheme among cells (i.e., handoff) is designated to be configurable. Each cell and mobile device can configure or even customize its own handoff procedure. In this paper, we examine the handoff misconfiguration issues in 3G/4G networks. We show that they may incur handoff instability in the form of persistent loops, where the device oscillates between cells even without radio-link and location changes. Such instability is mainly triggered by uncoordinated parameter configurations and inconsistent decision logic in the hand- off procedure. It can degrade user data performance, incur excessive signaling overhead, and violate network's expected handoff goals. We derive the instability conditions, and validate them on two major US mobile carrier networks. We further design a soft- ware tool for automatic loop detection, and run it over operational networks. We discuss possible fixes to such uncoordinated configurations among devices and cells.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        SIGMETRICS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Science
        June 2016
        434 pages
        ISBN:9781450342667
        DOI:10.1145/2896377
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 14 June 2016

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        Author Tags

        1. 3G/4G mobile network
        2. configuration
        3. instability
        4. mobility management

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        SIGMETRICS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 208 submissions, 13%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 459 of 2,691 submissions, 17%

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        Cited By

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        • (2024)Human-Intent-Driven Cellular Configuration Generation Using Program SynthesisIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2023.334538742:3(658-668)Online publication date: Mar-2024
        • (2024)SkyCastle: Taming LEO Mobility to Facilitate Seamless and Low-latency Satellite Internet ServicesIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621390(541-550)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
        • (2023)Dependent Misconfigurations in 5G/4.5G Radio Resource ControlProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/35952881:CoNEXT1(1-20)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
        • (2023)Movement-Based Reliable Mobility Management for Beyond 5G Cellular NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.319078831:1(192-207)Online publication date: Feb-2023
        • (2022)SEEDProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544260(129-142)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
        • (2022)Vivisecting mobility management in 5G cellular networksProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544217(86-100)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
        • (2022)Roadrunner: O-RAN-based Cell Selection in Beyond 5G NetworksNOMS 2022-2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789832(1-7)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
        • (2021)A nationwide study on cellular reliabilityProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference10.1145/3452296.3472908(597-609)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
        • (2021)ExperienceProceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3447993.3448138(28-41)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2021
        • (2021)Can Online Learning Increase the Reliability of Extreme Mobility Management?2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQOS)10.1109/IWQOS52092.2021.9521264(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2021
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