Challenges of massive access in highly dense LTE-advanced networks with machine-to-machine communications

Machine-to-machine wireless systems are being standardized to provide ubiquitous connectivity between machines without the need for human intervention. A natural concern of cellular operators and service providers is the impact that these machine type communications will have on current human type communications. Given the exponential growth of machine type communication traffic, it is of utmost importance to ensure that current voice and data traffic is not jeopardized. This article investigates the limits of machine type communication traffic coexisting with human communication traffic in LTE-A networks, such that human customer churn is minimized. We show that under proper design, the outage probability of human communication is marginally impacted whilst duty cycle and access delay of machine type communications are reasonably bounded to ensure viable M2M operations.