Chapter 8
Terminals and Applications
8.1 Introduction
LTE brings mobile communications to a new level. The LTE network supports much higher data rates than any of the previous wide-area mobile network solutions of 3GPP. This has an important impact on the terminals.
8.2 Effect of Smartphones on LTE
8.2.1 General
The last few years have seen tremendous increase in the number of smartphones on the market. The number of smartphones users is expected to grow further in coming years as cheaper and better smartphones are appearing. This growth has resulted in high revenues for operators but, at the same time, high congestion in the networks has been observed. Recent lab studies (in the UMTS test network) have suggested that it is not data utilization that is to be blamed but rather high Layer 3 (L3) signaling consumption of smartphones that has bogged down the networks.
Most Smartphone applications (e-mail, Facebook, etc.) are always on, running in the background and frequently obtaining updates from application servers. To make the situation even worst, smartphones keep connecting and disconnecting from the network, to save battery power. A single connection and disconnection from the network results in a large number of signaling messages, which can reduce the performance of the RRC state machine [1, 2].
For example the Google Android phone simply drops the RRC connection (Fast Dormancy) when it has no data to send, ...
