An intelligent GGSN dispatching mechanism for UMTS

3GPP proposed the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) to provide high-speed wireless transmission services to mobile users. To efficiently route the packets, the PDP contexts are maintained in the UE, SGSN, and GGSN in the UMTS network. Before beginning a session, the PDP Context Activation procedure is exercised to create the PDP contexts, where the SGSN selects one GGSN to serve the UE based on an IP list (for all GGSNs that can serve the UE). If the selected GGSN does not accept the request due to exception events, the SGSN chooses another GGSN until the list is exhausted, which may cause unbalance-loaded GGSNs, redundant traffic load to the network, introduce delay for the PDP context activation procedure, and thus decrease QoS for the UMTS network. To resolve the above issues, this paper proposes an intelligent GGSN dispatch mechanism 'IGD' with different sorting algorithms. The proposed mechanism is considered practical and easily installed in the existing UMTS network. We also conduct simulation experiments to investigate the performance of the IGD mechanism. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.