The Network Providers’ Growing Signaling Problems

As mobile operators race one another to add backhaul capacity to handle the traffic demanded by the growth in  smartphone  and tablet traffic, another point of possible overload on the system is increasingly becoming more at risk of failing – the signaling and control part of the network.

This problem has already started affecting some US operators. Verizon Wireless,  Telia  Sonera  and  Telenor  experienced first-hand as their  infrastructure  collapsed because of glitches in their signaling  infrastructure.

The problem? The growth of mobile and tablet usage and their demand for more bandwidth and Diameter signaling requests.

Diameter, an authentication, authorization and accounting protocol designed to handle simple things like charging users and simple policy control, has taken into its hands more and more  responsibilities  as the ecosystem evolves and network elements start interacting with one another in new and unexpected ways, ways for which the Diameter wasn’t designed for in the first place.

This bottleneck has already started causing problems. Earlier this year, Verizon Wireless experienced an outage , “blinding” many american users for at least 24 hours, cause by an escalating bug in it’s IP Multimedia Subsystem  Infrascturure  that  was supposed  to only cause a “hiccup” in the network,  chief  technology officer Tony  Melone  said  about  the outage.

But Verizon isn’t alone in this. Norway’s Telenor reported its own 18-hour outage earlier this year, caused by a ‘signal storm’. It  can be read in one of their reports to Norway’s regulators that “Telenor’s surveillance system showed that the  traffic  between servers in the mobile network increased far beyond normal levels… the increased signalling traffic continued to increase to the extent that the servers no longer managed to connect calls and  SMSes  to recipients”

Trying to face such challengers, vendors like  Tekelec  and 4G signaling specialist  Traffix  are delivering solutions so-called Diameter routing solutions. Such “routers” work directly with  LTE  network software elements to help distribute and scale network signals in a more efficient and intelligent way.

Tekelec  is working hard at improving their Diameter routers, having debuted a second release of it this summer and targeting the release of a third one by the end of the year.  Traffix  will also update its Diameter Edge Agent at this week’s 4G World, supposedly with new features to support roaming, billing and third-party content scenarios, and with tighter security.

It’s an  ever-increasing  problem at the hands of operators all over the world trying to cope with the market’s growth. Launching the iPhone’s browser,  for example, according to one signaling expert, sets off about fifteen  individual  network signaling requests. And there are millions of iPhones being used daily just in the UK.