Mobility Management for 5G IoT Devices: Improving Power Consumption With Lightweight Signaling Overhead

Abstract

In mobile wireless networks, mobility management (MM) is an important process to track and locate user equipments (UEs), including Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, while moving throughout the network. In long term evolution (LTE) and fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, the two MM procedures are known as tracking area update (TAU) and Paging , which are burdensome for both mobile IoT/UEs and network—the IoT/UEs and network always initiate the TAU and Paging , respectively. Because of potentially very high-volume traffic and increasing density of high-mobility IoT/UEs, the TAU/Paging procedure increases the accompanied signaling overhead and the power consumption in the battery-limited IoT/UEs. Hence, this problem will become even worse in 5G because the latter is expected to accommodate exceptional services (e.g., longer IoT/UE battery lifetime). We propose a new solution to solve this problem, named gNB-based UE mobility tracking (gNB-based UeMT). This solution has four features achieving 5G goals. First, the mobile IoT/UEs will no longer trigger the TAU to report their location changes, giving much higher power savings with no signaling overhead. Instead, second, the network elements, gNBs, take over the responsibility of Tracking and Locating these IoT/UEs, giving always-known IoT/UE locations. Third, our Paging procedure is markedly improved over the conventional one, providing very fast IoT/UE reachability with no Paging messages being sent simultaneously. Fourth, this solution guarantees lightweight signaling overhead with very low Paging delay; it achieves about 92% reduction in the corresponding signaling overhead. To this end, our solution adds no implementation complexity; instead, it exploits the already existing LTE/5G communication protocols, functions, and measurement reports.