MWC: Nokia Siemens Networks targeting excessive arm-waving in the mobile network

BARCELONA—So much attention has been focused on the dramatic growth of data in the mobile network, that the industry has failed to notice burgeoning threat, the increase in signaling noise in the network, said Rajeev Suri, Nokia Siemens Networks’ (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI) new CEO, at Mobile World Congress this week.

Though typical signaling traffic is small, it is compounding at an ever rapid rate as devices communicate more and more with the network without actually transferring any data back and forth, Suri said. A simple weather application on a smartphone can send out update requests 20 times a day while a push e-mail app can ping its enterprise server every second. More people are adopting smartphones and other connected media devices, and more applications that live part of their lives on the network or making their way into the smartphone, Suri said. Data plane capacity is an important consideration, but operators can’t just take the approach that adding more capacity will solve all of their problems, Suri said. If unchanged, signaling will crowd the network with unnecessary sessions as quickly as video, he concluded: “This will be enough to bring many networks to a painful, grinding halt.”

What’s more, the way data pricing is structured today, signaling traffic is unmonetizable traffic. No matter how much an operator is forced to scale its signaling gateways and network capacity to handle signaling increases, it isn’t charging a BlackBerry user for the amount of signaling his device generates, only for the data consumed. “It doesn’t generate revenue,” Suri said. “Signaling is just overhead.”

To combat it NSN has begun introducing signal-saving features in its gateways and network infrastructure, which Suri said can reduce the total load of signaling traffic by a factor of 3 without effecting the performance of applications. The technology isn’t proprietary. Rather NSN has adopted the 3GPP paging feature standards available to all network infrastructure vendors. It’s just been the first vendor to do so, Suri said. But he added that he believes the industry needs to go further, and create new signaling standards that reflect their increased drag on the network.