A D2D cooperative relay scheme for machine-to-machine communication in the LTE-A cellular network

The Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) cellular network is designed for human-to-human (H2H) communication. When a large number of machine-tomachine (M2M) devices are trying to access the network simultaneously, it leads to a low random access (RA) successful rate and high congestion problem, which may cause the waste of radio resources, packet loss, latency, extra power consumption, and the worst, M2M service error. There is an urge to propose an efficient method for M2M communication on the LTE-A network to resolve the congestion problem. In this paper, we analyze and model the RA procedure on the LTE-A network, try to find out the collapse point in the RA procedure and then propose a scheme named D2D cooperative relay scheme to relieve the congestion problem. Simulation results show that the network throughput and the congestion can be significantly improved using the proposed mechanism.