A few years ago RAD’s president
Zohar Zisapel asked me to accompany him to a meeting with another Israeli company concerning possible cooperation on an important issue. On our way I asked him what this important issue was. He replied
the iPhone problem and I immediately understood.
He informed me that he had been in the US the previous week, and although he carried a Blackberry and not an iPhone, he had experienced inability to connect to the network even for voice calls, calls dropping in the middle, cell breathing (which he graphically described as the signal strength bars undulating up and down), and of course inability to connect to data services. Once back in Tel Aviv, he had contacted companies with whom RAD could cooperate in trying to solve the problem.
I had seen many reports on the problems AT&T was experiencing in New York and San Francisco since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, but had not known it was really that bad. Obviously the iPhone brought significantly increased bandwidth usage due to users being “always on” and consuming more video streaming and other high-datarate services rather than just sporadically sending an email or downloading a file. However, networks in other parts of the world with many different kinds of smartphones were not experiencing such catastrophic failures; in fact, many operators with whom I had spoken were not observing any problems at all!
What could be causing these problems? There were really only three possibilities:
- lack of resources in the air interface (known as spectrum crunch or spectral exhaustion),
- under-provisioning of the backhaul network,
- failure of the signaling servers (due to what are known as signaling storms);
and if the second item was the problem (or at least a major chunk of it), then RAD was uniquely positioned to help.
Why did we expect that the second problem to be at the root of the problem? Well, the backhaul network is extremely cost sensitive, and increasing bandwidth there was an expensive and time consuming task. We didn’t expect the air interface to be already congested (although we expected the spectrum to eventually become exhausted) since AT&T had already deployed HSPA+. We ruled out signaling as the major issue, since denser networks of smartphones were not experiencing similar problems.
Of course we now know that we were completely wrong, and that signaling server failure
was the major problem. The explanation was intimately related to the slim design of the iPhone, and to fact that Americans had never adopted text and multimedia messaging as avidly as Europeans did.
To understand what went wrong and how the issue was eventually solved, I need to explain 3G Radio Resource Control (RRC) states. The RRC protocol is the control plane between the 3G network and the UE (User Equipment, e.g., cellphone). It is responsible for handling many interactions such as locating the UE, waking it up, establishing/releasing connections for voice and data, and for sending SMS’es.
The UE can be in one of five possible
RRC states, called Idle, URA_PCH, Cell_PCH, Cell_FACH, and Cell_DCH. In Idle mode the UE is only known to the network by its IMSI (telephone number), and only listens to system broadcasts and paging information. It only very rarely transmits (and even then only location updates) and barely uses its receiver (waking up periodically to check if it has been paged). Battery drain is thus extremely low. At the other extreme is the Cell Dedicated Channel state. Here the UE is using a dedicated high-speed data channel, and may be consuming 100 times more battery power. In between are the PCH states where the UE is connected but still relatively inactive, consuming only a little battery power; and the FACH state where the UE is using shared channels for exchange of small bursts of data, and consuming perhaps half of what it would consume in DCH.
Now, a UE in the Cell_PCH state that needs to send a short data packet (e.g., an application keepalive) will need to transition to Cell_FACH. It does this by sending a single signaling message and receiving a single reply. After sending its data packet, the UE will only drop back to Cell_PCH after a relatively long timeout (several seconds), and in the meantime will be wasting battery power. In order to conserve battery power many manufacturers, starting with RIM in its Blackberry, but more notably Apple in the iPhone and various manufacturers for Android devices, devised a trick. The UE sends a SCRI Signaling Connection Release Indication message, a message that was intended to convey that some unexpected error has occurred in the UE, and that the network should immediately release its connection. The UE drops into the Idle state, with almost no battery drain. However, the network effectively forgets it, and the next time the UE needs to transmit something, it needs to go from idle state to FACH, which is a signaling-intensive (over 25 messages) and lengthy operation.
The consequences of this trick were not very apparent when it was only used by Blackberry handsets, which are mainly used for email and occasional short data transfers. On the other hand, iPhone users tend to continually pull and push data, watch and stream videos, and are generally “always on”. In addition, the iPhone’s iconic slimness meant that Apple couldn’t use anything larger than a 1400 mAh battery, so that Apple was particularly aggressive in sending SCRIs. Finally, in the US where SMS had never been as popular as in Europe, the signaling infrastructure was woefully undersized for millions of iPhones disconnecting and reconnecting to the network.
The initial resolution involved increasing server resources and freeing up bandwidth for signaling channels. The eventual solution was a signaling enhancement in 3GPP Release 8 called Fast Dormancy, which Apple adopted towards the end of 2010. This enhancement enables the UE to transition quickly from FACH state to PCH, rather than to Idle as in the trick. Thus the network remembers the UE, and it can rapidly transition back and forth between FACH and PCH states.
Of course, iPhones are not alone in having caused signaling storms. In mid 2011 the Android port of Angry Birds caused significant signaling traffic that stressed networks until an update solved the problem, and in January 2012 NTT Docomo suffered a 4½ hour outage in Tokyo due to an Android application that overloaded the signaling plane.
And according to many reports, spectral exhaustion is right around the corner.
Y(J)S
