A Radio Resource Sharing Scheme for IoT/M2M Communication in LTE-A Downlink

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is an emerging technology which offers various ubiquitous services and is one of the main enablers of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. Nevertheless, the notion of cellular-M2M communication is emerging due to the wide range, high reliability, increased capacity and decreased costs of future mobile networks. Consequently, M2M traffic is anticipated to pose severe challenges to mobile networks due to a myriad of devices sending and receiving small sized data. Moreover, mobile M2M traffic is expected to degrade the performance of traditional cellular traffic due to inefficient utilization of the scarce radio spectrum. This paper proposes a packet aggregation scheme to efficiently utilize radio spectrum for downlink M2M/IoT traffic. Therefore, the small sized data packets are aggregated at the Donor eNBs (DeNB) by considering the latest 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardized Long-Term-Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks. Additionally, 3GPP standardized layer 3 inband Relay Nodes (RNs) are used for de-multiplexing of aggregated packets in downlink. The proposed scheme is validated through extensive system level simulations in an LTE-A based implementation for the RIVERBED modeler simulator. Our simulation results show that the number of M2M/IoT devices served per PRB (Physical Resource Block) is approximately doubled with the proposed packet aggregation scheme as compared to conventional relaying.