Overload control in the network domain of LTE/LTE-A based machine type communications

Abstract

It is expected that the LTE network, which includes the Radio Access Network (RAN) and the Core Network (CN) in 3GPP LTE systems, will be overloaded due to the huge number of Machine-Type Communication (MTC) devices in the near future. Overload in the RAN and CN of the LTE may result in congestion occurrence, resource waste, Quality of Service (QoS) degradation and in the worst-case, it will cause service unavailability. In this paper, we have proposed an adaptive mechanism to manage a large number of MTC devices in both RAN and CN of the LTE network. We use Access Class Barring (ACB) scheme to regulate the MTC traffic according to the congestions level in the RAN and CN. We consider a scenario in which two-priority-based classes of MTC devices are contending for the RAN resources. At first, the overload problem in the RAN is formulated to find the number of allowable contending MTC devices of each class taking into account their required QoS. Then, an active load management policy based on additive increase multiplicative decrease rule is proposed to control the incoming load from multiple cells to the CN. To effectively limit the number of MTC devices in both RAN and CN, in the proposed approach, each Evolved Node B updates the ACB factor upon overload detection in the RAN or CN in an adaptive manner. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism is able to manage overload in the CN and RAN simultaneously.