A Dynamic Resource Allocation Scheme for Group Paging in LTE-Advanced Networks

Group paging is one of the solutions proposed to deal with the radio access network (RAN) overload problem resulted from bursty machine-type communications (MTC) traffic in long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) networks. In group paging, the base station normally reserves a fixed amount of random access opportunities (RAOs) for the grouped users to perform random access (RA) during a paging access interval. However, the number of contending users is quickly decreased and thus, static allocation of RAOs is not efficient. This paper presents a dynamic resource allocation (DRA) scheme which dynamically adjusts the reserved RAOs for group paging based on the estimated number of contending users in each RA slot. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the traditional static allocation scheme, the proposed DRA scheme can improve the utilization of RAOs by 9% under a target access success probability constraint of 90%.