RAN overload control for Machine Type Communications in LTE

In Radio Access Network (RAN) overload situations, more access attempts are made to the system than the system can handle. In particular, Machine Type Communication (MTC) devices are foreseen as potential source of overload in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. In this paper, we study overload scenarios caused by MTC traffic in LTE and investigate how to solve them. Especially, we study Extended Access Barring (EAB) recently introduced in 3GPP to control the access load. We find that performance of the EAB scheme depends on many factors such as what parameters are used and how the parameter values are updated in the System Information (SI). We find that EAB solution for MTC overload control can solve the overload situation effectively, if configured properly.