QUIC-Enabled Data Aggregation for Short Packet Communication in mMTC

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the Short Packet Communication (SPC) in the typical massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) scenario of 5G/6G networks. For the conventional scheme, tremendous Machine Type Communication Devices (MTCDs) send short status update packets directly to the central Base Station (BS) using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which leads to a huge burden on the BS and may cause severe communication congestion. To solve this problem, we propose a frame-level data aggregation SPC scheme based on the Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol. By using the stream multiplexing feature of QUIC, some MTCDs selected as aggregators receive the short status update packets from their neighboring MTCDs, pack the data into new QUIC packets, and forward these new packets to the BS. The QUIC-based SPC scheme is evaluated in the 5G network environment. It is proved that our scheme reduces the communication overhead of the BS by about 10% and the computing burden of the BS by average 40% in CPU usage.