Traffic Control by Influencing User Behavior

Traffic generation in mobile networks is heavily dependent on user behavior because the users move around with their terminals. For example, at a special event such as a fireworks display or football game, the people will congregate in a specific place and may try to make calls, generating unpredictable excessive traffic, leading to network congestion. When the users cannot get through due to congestion, they tend to make call requests repeatedly (repeated calls), which aggravates the network congestion further and in the worst case might even cause the network functions to break down. In order to avoid situations where services cannot be provided due to excessive load on the network equipment, controlling the traffic is an important issue. Currently, mobile network operators control the traffic by restricting the users’ communication demands (calls) forcefully by imposing calling restrictions or similar at congestion. However, when such methods are applied, the users lose the opportunities to use the services and the user satisfaction level may be decreased. To solve this problem, we examined a new traffic control method that attempts to influence user behavior before the traffic flows into the network. This effect is achieved by guiding the users to collaborate by providing information to them when the traffic is too heavy to control solely by network control methods. We call this new method “traffic control by influencing user behavior” [1]. This method aims to improve the opportunities of the users to use communication services by effectually controlling the number of repeated calls and ultimately increase the users’ satisfaction level. Moreover, for the benefit of network construction, operation and management, it is of great importance to take repeated calls into consideration when understanding the traffic characteristics of the network. For this reason, we evaluated the effects of repeated calls on the network performance.