An Efficient M2M-Oriented Network-Integrated Multiple-Period Polling Service in LTE Network

Machine Type communication (MTC) in LTE networks is expected to gain a great popularity in the next decade. Due to different traffic characteristics, it poses some challenges for traditional random access procedure and resource allocation algorithm in LTE network. We propose a polling service that avoids contention. This service is integrated into LTE access network, fully compatible with the standard access mechanism and able to manage a large range of polling periods (typically from 1 minute to 28 days). This proposed service reduces the transmission overhead and thus improves the energy efficiency for MTC devices. It also reduces access network overload in radio access network by avoiding random access. Compared with traditional random access mechanism, numerical results show that with proposed service one eNodeB (eNB) can easily support up to 15000 MTC devices without network access collision.