earticle

영어

In aiming for service innovation, mobile operators are in the process of providing an environment that encourages third parties to create a wide variety of Web applications by making use of an application programming interface that the network offers. This paper presents an analysis method for dealing with API-oriented traffic, one of the major operational challenges in the coming IMS era which must be overcome in developing a highly stable and reliable communication system. We addressed this issue by extending traffic evaluation methods used for the commercial i-mode service in Japan. API traffic models are defined based on process sequences and the user packets invoked by an API request and these models are used in the performance evaluation of nodes in a system. We found that API traffic can have a large impact on the CPU use of the gateway modules. Thus, network capacity planning should take account of the impact of estimated API traffic on a mobile network. Our proposal allows mobile operators to construct a highly stable and reliable system which supports service innovation by providing APIs to application developers.