Countering mobile signaling storms with counters

Abstract

Mobile Networks are subject to signaling storms launched by misbehaving applications or malware, which result in bandwidth overload at the cell level and excessive signaling within the mobile operator, and may also deplete the battery power of mobile devices. This paper reviews the causes of signaling storms and proposes a novel technique for storm detection and mitigation. The approach is based on counting the number of successive signaling transitions that do not utilize allocated bandwidth, and temporarily blocking mobile devices that exceed a certain threshold to avoid overloading the network. Through a mathematical analysis, we derive the optimum value of the counter’s threshold, which minimizes both the number of misbehaving mobiles and the signaling overload in the network. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.