Aggregating cellular communication lines for IoT devices by sharing IMSI

Abstract

To provide cellular communications for a large number of internet of things (IoT) devices, the mobile core system, called as evolved packet core (EPC) in the 4G system case, emerges to equip a large amount of computational resources. This is because the EPC needs to maintain state information on the communications of the IoT devices, even if they rarely send data. This paper proposes a method for reducing the state information. The proposed method assigns the same international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) to multiple IoT devices, which upload data with the same cycle, and manages devices uploading data at different timings. This paper shows through the simulation-based verifications that the proposal can reduce the state information to less than one-hundredth.