Comparison of signaling performance in the UMTS radio access network and a merged radio access network architecture

The paper describes a case study in which the current UMTS radio access network (UTRAN, Release 3) is compared to a modified architecture where radio network controller (RNC) functionality is completely moved to the node B. The new architecture better suits IP principles. Both architectures are evaluated with respect to signaling traffic employing an event-driven simulation model automatically generated from a set of use cases. Our study allows the comparison of the end-to-end delay signaling traffic for both architectures.