Impact of M2M traffic in random access channel over LTE networks

Abstract

Nowadays, humanity is surrounded by many technological devices that are connected to the Internet (sensors, smart meters, etc.). These devices can transmit and receive data automatically via interfaces for wireless transmission of data, thus generating Machine-to-Machine (M2M) traffic. This massive connectivity provides attractive new services, usually transmitting fragments of small data. This is especially true for Long-Term Evolution (LTE), which was originally optimized for users Human-to-Human (H2H). The main problem caused by the introduction of M2M applications is the congestion that occurs at the access network because of the tremendous number of devices that attempt to simultaneously access the network. This article provides M2M communication methods based on the 3GPP standard. In this paper we consider concurrent access to radio resources in a M2M/H2H coexistence scenario based on a dynamic random access algorithm for LTE network. This work studies the impact of M2M terminals massively and simultaneously attempting to have a random access to LTE. First, we emphasize the problem of resources sharing by MTC devices. Then we assess the impact of the introduction of M2M services on the performance of applications H2H according to throughput metric.