Embodiments of the present disclosure include a mobility management entity (MME) receives a downlink data notification (DDN) message sent by a serving gateway (SGW), where the DDN message carries an identity of user equipment, and the DDN message is used to instruct the MME to send a paging message to a base station in a tracking area list (TA list) of the user equipment. After enabling an aggregate paging function, the MME determines, according to the DDN message, whether a priority of the user equipment is higher than a preset level. If the priority of the user equipment is higher than the preset level, the MME directly sends the paging message to the base station. The present disclosure is applicable to a paging message sending process.