Influence of future M2M communication on the LTE system

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications is one of the latest research areas. This technology aims to enable machines to communicate with each other, mainly, without human intervention. M2M traffic is envisaged to play a big role within the coming years; lots of research projects and standardization bodies around the world have already started paying attention to the rising M2M communication. Current cellular mobile networks, such as LTE, are designed and optimized for traffic characteristics of human-based communication, but M2M traffic is different: Packet sizes are small, but transmitted periodically by numerous endpoints. In this paper, we focus on how LTE cellular networks will handle the massive deployment of M2M devices. In order to do so, the authors specified an M2M traffic model that represent a possible logistical scenario in the future. Besides M2M traffic, also regular LTE traffic is present in the network and the influence of the increasing M2M traffic is investigated. The results of the simulations show that M2M traffic will influence regular, human-based traffic. In particular the file upload time for regular LTE traffic experiences a considerable increase.