A review of mobility management entity in LTE networks: Power consumption and signaling overhead

Mobility management (MM) in Long‐Term Evolution (LTE) networks is a vital process to keep an individual User Equipment (UE) connected while moving within the network coverage area. MM Entity (MME) is the LTE component responsible for tracking and paging procedures and controlling the corresponding signaling between the UE and its serving cell, which is necessary for data‐packet exchange. Because of the massive increase in the density of mobile UEs, MME is burdened by the high volume signaling load, especially because most of that load comes from Tracking Area Update (TAU) and Paging messages, which are essential to exchange UE‐specific information with the network. To achieve cost‐efficient resource provisioning, many solutions have been proposed for TAU and Paging management to optimize not only UE experience (ie, battery power consumption) but also network resources (ie, bandwidth). In this paper, we discuss various solution schemes for TAU and Paging in terms of complexity, latency, and computation costs. Also, this review discusses the adverse effects of these solutions on the LTE Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Furthermore, we present a new trend of MM solutions in LTE networks, called software‐defined network (SDN) and software‐defined virtualization (SDNV). To this end, we examine the existing schemes and challenges in the literature toward next‐generation wireless networks (eg, 5G, Internet‐of‐Things [IoT], and machine to machine [M2M] communications), and we describe user mobility models that are used to analyze the network performance.