Reducing State Information by Sharing IMSI for Cellular IoT Devices

Abstract

To provide cellular communications for a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the mobile core system, called evolved packet core (EPC) in the case of a 4G system, requires a large amount of computational resources. This is because the EPC needs to maintain communication state information for IoT devices, even if they rarely send data. This paper proposes a method for reducing state information. The proposed method assigns the same international mobile subscriber identity to multiple IoT devices, which upload data with the same cycle, and manages devices uploading data at different timings. This paper investigates the impact of factors affecting the performance of the proposed method through several simulation-based verifications and shows that the proposal can reduce the required state information to less than 0.5% compared to the current EPC method.