Uplink access control for machine-type communications in LTE-A networks

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) has been considered as one of the most promising technologies over the next decade. One of the basic requirements of IoT is the global communication connectivity between smart objects. LTE-A has been considered as the main communication channel for connecting devices. For this reason, the machine-type communication (MTC) has been defined in the 3GPP LTE-A specification. With the rapid growth of the IoT devices, MTC in LTE-A faces many challenges. The primary design of a LTE-A network is to support the human-type communication (HTC). However, MTC and HTC have different characteristics, such as packet size, traffic arrival rate, and delay tolerance. How to accommodate a large amount of MTC traffic without affecting the grade of service of the HTC is challenging. More specifically, before accessing the LTE-A network, a random access (RA) procedure needs to be performed by a device to synchronize in the uplink of an eNB. Since the number of MTC devices is expected to be much greater than the HTC devices, without suitable access control, the success rate of the RA requests from the HTC devices can be significantly degraded. Therefore, this research aims to design an appropriate RA procedure to relieve this problem. The authors propose an Adaptive RACH Resource Allocation (ARRA) which integrates several control schemes, including a Resource Allocation scheme, an Access Class Barring scheme, and a Priority Device Setting scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed ARRA is able to achieve a higher access success rate and a lower latency for HTC devices while providing a different quality of service to different types of MTC devices.