A token-bucket based notification traffic control mechanism for IMS presence service

Presence is a service that allows a user to be informed about the specified state of another user. Presence service has become a key enabler for next-generation applications such as instant messaging, push-to-talk and web2.0. However, recent studies show that the notification traffic of presence service causes heavy signaling load on IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) network. This paper introduced a token-bucket based notification traffic control (TNTC) mechanism, which is an application layer solution deployed at the presence server. The TNTC aims at upgrading valid access probability while controlling the notification traffic. A mathematical model of a queuing system is proposed to describe TNTC. We analyzed its main probability features and investigated the effects of different parameters on the performance of TNTC. Extensive simulations verified that TNTC can effectively control notification traffic and perform better than the existing schemes in terms of valid access probability and update arrival rate.