Modeling and Comprehensive Review of Signaling Storms in 3GPP-Based Mobile Broadband Networks: Causes, Solutions, and Countermeasures

Control signaling is mandatory for the operation and management of all types of communication networks, including the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile broadband networks. However, they consume important and scarce network resources such as bandwidth and processing power. There have been several reports of these control signaling turning into signaling storms halting network operations and causing the respective Telecom companies big financial losses. This paper draws its motivation from such real network disaster incidents attributed to signaling storms. In this paper, we present a thorough survey of the causes, of the signaling storm problems in 3GPP-based mobile broadband networks and discuss in detail their possible solutions and countermeasures. We provide relevant analytical models to help quantify the effect of the potential causes and benefits of their corresponding solutions. Another important contribution of this paper is the comparison of the possible causes and solutions/countermeasures, concerning their effect on several important network aspects such as architecture, additional signaling, fidelity, etc., in the form of a table. This paper presents an update and an extension of our earlier conference publication. To our knowledge, no similar survey study exists on the subject. Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Published by Tech Science Press.