Efficient small data access for machine-type communications in LTE

In this paper, we address the emerging concept of Machine-Type Communications (MTC), where unattended wireless devices send their data over the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular network. In particular, we emphasize that future MTC deployments are expected to feature a very large number of devices, whereas the data from a particular device may be infrequent and small. Currently, LTE is not optimized for such traffic and its data transmission schemes are not MTC-specific. To improve the efficiency of small data access, we propose a novel contention-based LTE transmission (COBALT) mechanism and evaluate its performance with both analysis and protocol-level simulations. When compared against existing alternatives, our data access scheme is demonstrated to improve network resource consumption, device energy efficiency, and mean data access delay. We conclude that COBALT has the potential for supporting massive MTC deployments based on the future releases of the LTE technology.