Random access issues for smart grid communication in LTE networks

The long-term evolution (LTE) network has become an attractive candidate for Smart Grid (SG) communications. Regardless of LTE´s growing popularity as a means of transporting SG data, it is mainly designed for high speed and high capacity data traffic such as video streaming and Internet traffic. One of the key elements of the SG is the Smart Meter (SM). Typically, there are more than 30,000 SMs per eNode-B, bombarding it with billions of tiny fixed-size packets containing power consumption data. Thus, the eNode-B may not be able to provide a Random Access Channel (RACH) to all SMs and active UEs. In this paper, we investigate the preamble conflict at an eNode-B. The results indicate that the number of preambles has an impact on the network´s performance, such as throughput, latency and packets loss.