Reducing signaling overload: Flexible capillary admission control for dense MTC over LTE networks

The increasing adoption of Machine-Type Communication (MTC) applications on existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) brings new challenges for traditional signaling mechanism and system capacity. MTC is related to high number of devices; which represents a challenge when performing control and signaling procedures required for getting resource grant, since these processes are inefficient compared to the actual resource usage for small data transmissions. Solutions based on device grouping propose a static grouping approach, which does not perform well in low load scenario. This paper introduces the notion of a flexible admission/connection that can give granular group device control to Core network. With the proposed approach devices can be grouped for a certain period of time under supervision and control of a gateway and they can be ungrouped when there is no need for grouping them together. In this way, a finer control can be achieved on prioritizing certain services and load balancing. Our simulation results demonstrate significant signaling reduction by using this simple scheme compared to conventional connection procedure.