Energy-efficiency of LTE for small data machine-to-machine communications

In this paper, we evaluate the energy-efficiency of LTE for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications with small data transmissions. We quantify the minimum resources that can be allocated in LTE for the uplink and we show that the energy-efficiency of the transmissions of small blocks of data strongly depends on the transmission power and the Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) procedure. Indeed, when an aggressive Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) is used thanks to good channel quality, the energy-efficiency of LTE decreases for the transmission of small amounts of data, as the physical resource blocks are under-utilized. In addition, we propose a solution to deal with this drawback by selecting an optimal MCS and utilizing the LTE Uplink Power Control (UPC) mechanism. The results presented in this paper are based on open-source ns-3 computer-based simulations.