Signalling cost evaluation of mobility management schemes for different core network architectural arrangements in 3GPP LTE/SAE

System Architecture Evolution (SAE) is one of the key challenges for the Long Term Evolution(LTE) of 3G research, charted by 3GPP, aiming to develop a new core network for improving the IP based packet-switched network performance. This paper considers different mobility management schemes for different SAE core network architectural options proposed in 3GPP, and evaluates their performance according to signalling cost by using analytical modelling based on the random walk model. Our analysis shows that the mobility management performance of the different options on both Idle and Active mode. Regarding the architecture, options 2 and 3 have the best trade-off in total signalling cost performance in both modes and signalling load on each network node for system scalability. For mobitity management, Proxy MIPv6 has shown that it is able to effectively reduce the signalling cost for mobility management for all architecture options.