Performance analysis of small data transmission schemes for cellular M2M communications

Abstract

Channel access procedures of the state-of-the-art cellular standards create a significant overhead for small messages transmitted by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As IoT becomes a major source of traffic for next-generation wireless communications, there are recent efforts to design low-overhead access schemes. Here we present the delay and capacity analysis of two low-overhead access protocols in a setting similar to LTEM which is recently standardized for IoT communications. The first protocol that we evaluate is an ALOHA-like immediate transmission scheme where the data is transmitted without channel reservation. The second protocol is a preamble-initiated contention-based access scheme where a frequency/time resource is imperfectly reserved by the transmission of a random preamble. Our results show that preamble-initiated contention-based access improves small message throughput 86% both with respect to the ALOHA-like scheme and the conventional LTE channel access. On the other hand, the ALOHA-like scheme provides 62% lower delay in comparison to the preamble-initiated contention based scheme at low traffic load conditions. Conventional LTE channel access does not provide any improvement in throughput or delay over these two schemes for small message transmissions.

Publication
2017 16th Annual Mediterranean Ad Hoc Networking Workshop (Med-Hoc-Net)

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