Filtering Methods for Efficient Dynamic Access Control in 5G Massive Machine-Type Communication Scenarios

[EN] One of the three main use cases of the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) is massive machine-type communications (mMTC). The latter refers to the highly synchronized accesses to the cellular base stations from a great number of wireless devices, as a product of the automated exchange of small amounts of data. Clearly, an efficient mMTC is required to support the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Nevertheless, the method to change from idle to connected mode, known as the random access procedure (RAP), of 4G has been directly inherited by 5G, at least, until the first phase of standardization. Research has demonstrated the RAP is inefficient to support mMTC, hence, access control schemes are needed to obtain an adequate performance. In this paper, we compare the benefits of using different filtering methods to configure an access control scheme included in the 5G standards: the access class barring (ACB), according to the intensity of access requests. These filtering methods are a key component of our proposed ACB configuration scheme, which can lead to more than a three-fold increase in the probability of successfully completing the random access procedure under the most typical network configuration and mMTC scenario.This research has been supported in part by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain under Grant TIN2013-47272-C2-1-R and Grant TEC2015-71932-REDT. The research of I. Leyva-Mayorga was partially funded by grant 383936 CONACYT-GEM 2014.Leyva-Mayorga, I.; Rodríguez-Hernández, MA.; Pla, V.; Martínez Bauset, J. (2019). Filtering Methods for Efficient Dynamic Access Control in 5G Massive Machine-Type Communication Scenarios. Electronics. 8(1):1-18. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8010027S11881Laya, A., Alonso, L., & Alonso-Zarate, J. (2014). Is the Random Access Channel of LTE and LTE-A Suitable for M2M Communications? A Survey of Alternatives. 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Massive M2M Access with Reliability Guarantees in LTE Systems

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications are one of the major drivers of the cellular network evolution towards 5G systems. One of the key challenges is on how to provide reliability guarantees to each accessing device in a situation in which there is a massive number of almost-simultaneous arrivals from a large set of M2M devices. The existing solutions take a reactive approach in dealing with massive arrivals, such as non-selective barring when a massive arrival event occurs, which implies that the devices cannot get individual reliability guarantees. In this paper we propose a proactive approach, based on a standard operation of the cellular access. The access procedure is divided into two phases, an estimation phase and a serving phase. In the estimation phase the number of arrivals is estimated and this information is used to tune the amount of resources allocated in the serving phase. Our results show that the proactive approach is instrumental in delivering high access reliability to the M2M devices.Comment: Accepted for presentation in ICC 201

Massive Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Cellular IoT: Potentials and Limitations

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises ubiquitous connectivity of everything everywhere, which represents the biggest technology trend in the years to come. It is expected that by 2020 over 25 billion devices will be connected to cellular networks; far beyond the number of devices in current wireless networks. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications aims at providing the communication infrastructure for enabling IoT by facilitating the billions of multi-role devices to communicate with each other and with the underlying data transport infrastructure without, or with little, human intervention. Providing this infrastructure will require a dramatic shift from the current protocols mostly designed for human-to-human (H2H) applications. This article reviews recent 3GPP solutions for enabling massive cellular IoT and investigates the random access strategies for M2M communications, which shows that cellular networks must evolve to handle the new ways in which devices will connect and communicate with the system. A massive non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique is then presented as a promising solution to support a massive number of IoT devices in cellular networks, where we also identify its practical challenges and future research directions.Comment: To appear in IEEE Communications Magazin

Code-Expanded Random Access for Machine-Type Communications

The random access methods used for support of machine-type communications (MTC) in current cellular standards are derivatives of traditional framed slotted ALOHA and therefore do not support high user loads efficiently. Motivated by the random access method employed in LTE, we propose a novel approach that is able to sustain a wide random access load range, while preserving the physical layer unchanged and incurring minor changes in the medium access control layer. The proposed scheme increases the amount of available contention resources, without resorting to the increase of system resources, such as contention sub-frames and preambles. This increase is accomplished by expanding the contention space to the code domain, through the creation of random access codewords. Specifically, in the proposed scheme, users perform random access by transmitting one or none of the available LTE orthogonal preambles in multiple random access sub-frames, thus creating access codewords that are used for contention. In this way, for the same number of random access sub-frames and orthogonal preambles, the amount of available contention resources is drastically increased, enabling the support of an increased number of MTC users. We present the framework and analysis of the proposed code-expanded random access method and show that our approach supports load regions that are beyond the reach of current systems.Comment: 6 Pages, 7 figures, This paper has been submitted to GC'12 Workshop: Second International Workshop on Machine-to-Machine Communications 'Key' to the Future Internet of Thing

Reliable Reporting for Massive M2M Communications with Periodic Resource Pooling

This letter considers a wireless M2M communication scenario with a massive number of M2M devices. Each device needs to send its reports within a given deadline and with certain reliability, e. g. 99.99%. A pool of resources available to all M2M devices is periodically available for transmission. The number of transmissions required by an M2M device within the pool is random due to two reasons - random number of arrived reports since the last reporting opportunity and requests for retransmission due to random channel errors. We show how to dimension the pool of M2M-dedicated resources in order to guarantee the desired reliability of the report delivery within the deadline. The fact that the pool of resources is used by a massive number of devices allows to base the dimensioning on the central limit theorem. The results are interpreted in the context of LTE, but they are applicable to any M2M communication system.Comment: Submitted to journa

A Scalable Hybrid MAC Protocol for Massive M2M Networks

In Machine to Machine (M2M) networks, a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is crucial to enable numerous machine-type devices to concurrently access the channel. Most literatures focus on developing simplex (reservation or contention based)MAC protocols which cannot provide a scalable solution for M2M networks with large number of devices. In this paper, a frame-based Hybrid MAC scheme, which consists of a contention period and a transmission period, is proposed for M2M networks. In the proposed scheme, the devices firstly contend the transmission opportunities during the contention period, only the successful devices will be assigned a time slot for transmission during the transmission period. To balance the tradeoff between the contention and transmission period in each frame, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the system throughput by finding the optimal contending probability during contention period and optimal number of devices that can transmit during transmission period. A practical hybrid MAC protocol is designed to implement the proposed scheme. The analytical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Hybrid MAC protocol