Coordinated Random Access Management for Network Overload Avoidance in Cellular Machine-to-Machine Communications

Inhalt:
The rapid deployment and adoption of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications pose significant challenges to the current cellular network with its features and traffic patterns being significantly different from conventional Human-to-Human (H2H) communications. In particular, the signaling channels can easily get congested due to simultaneous network access from massive M2M devices. For successful integration of M2M communications into the cellular network, we propose an optimization mechanism, which can greatly reduce the congestion probability as well as the amount of network signaling incurred from massive M2M communications. The proposed approach applies an efficient resource coordination scheme to the Random Access Channel (RACH), where signaling process within a group of related M2M devices is well handled, meanwhile preventing unnecessary recurring data transmissions with substantially reduced additional signaling overhead. Proposals on the framework of the proposed scheme are presented. Results show that our approach provides significant improvement in mitigating congestion and network overload particularly in case of large numbers of M2M devices deployed within a cell.