Performance evaluation of cooperation-based techniques for M2M traffic over LTE

Long Term Evolution (LTE) and its evolved version, LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), are the standards developed by 3GPP to avoid the limitations associated to 3G networks. Efforts have been put on the improvement of system performance in terms of data rates. Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) and inter-cell interference avoidance techniques have been widely studied in order to do that. However, not only is the increase in data rate important, but also latency reduction is a crucial factor to be considered for some applications. For instance, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications are nowadays one of the most promising applications, which are very sensitive to delay. In this work, we evaluate one of the most promising CoMP techniques, i.e. non-precoded Joint Transmission (non-precoded JT) and one of the most widely studied Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) avoidance technique, i.e. Partial Frequency Reuse (PFR). The objective is to determine whether, in addition to increase the data rates, they also reduce the latency. Simulation results show that PFR presents a greater reduction in the mean packet delay than this associated to non-precoded JT.