A group-based communication scheme based on the location information of MTC devices in cellular networks

Recent standardization efforts in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) have made the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system a very attractive radio access technology for various types of devices and applications. However, the system has not yet been optimized to support diverse traffic profiles. In this paper, we propose a group-based communication scheme to alleviate inefficiencies in the radio access network. The proposed scheme groups multiple connections triggered by different User Equipments (UEs). For the efficient grouping of the UEs, the location information of the Machine-Type Communication (MTC) devices is utilized to identify each group. A four-phase system model is presented to analyze each segment of the connection establishment procedure in the access network. We found that the random access procedure is the main variable factor for the communication delay, and we, therefore, carefully design the procedure with details. Simulations are conducted on our LTE testbeds, and the results show that the proposed scheme is very effective in ensuring the system performance of legacy services and in utilizing radio resources within a given delay bound.