Abstraction of random access procedure for bursty MTC traffic in 5G networks

Abstract

The evolution towards 5G network emphasizes on massive machine type communication (mMTC) as an important work direction. Massive connectivity in Machine-Type Communications (MTC) poses huge challenge for the efficient management of random access mechanism, originally designed and optimized for limited number of broadband connections in legacy networks. When large number of MTC devices, with bursty traffic characteristics, randomly attempt to access the network, the probability of collision preambles drastically increases. Thus, with increased scalability of MTC devices the performance of LTE/LTE-A random access mechanism degrades sharply. Our proposed analysis provides optimal access class barring to maximize the number of average access success preambles. We also evaluate the upper bound performance to estimate the average access delay. The proposed optimal random access procedure facilitates for abstractions in simulations to better serve efficient network design that supports scalability of new MTC devices. © 2018 IEEE.