Lightweight paging based on location update intervals in LTE network

Abstract

Recently, LTE high-speed mobile communications have allowed service developers to create various interactive applications using push communications. In a push communication, a paging procedure is required to find the location of the target mobile terminal and to notify the arrival of the pushed data. The Mobility Management Entity (MME) speculatively sends many copies of a paging message to base stations to catch the target mobile terminal. As push-communication applications increase, the workload of MME will increase owing to multiple copies of paging messages sent and this would cause, delay of communication initiation. We propose a lightweight paging method where the MME selects paging areas based on the elapsed time of the last location update in LTE. Compared to ordinary paging (i.e., the paging area is pre-configured) we show through simulation experiments that the workload is reduced in the proposed method.