A Novel Group Paging Control Method for Massive MTC Accesses in LTE Networks

Abstract The fifth-generation (5G) systems have to deal with massive deployment of machine-type-communication (MTC) devices. System overload may occur during a random access (RA) procedure under a limited number of preamble resources and physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) resources especially when there exist massive MTC devices in a cell. In order to resolve the system overload (caused by the massive MTC deployment), the 3GPP proposed the adopted a group paging (GP)-based uplink access technique. But its performances dramatically decrease as the number of MTC devices increases. In this paper we propose a novel method, named ACB-based group paging overload control method (AGO). To reduce the number of simultaneous access MTC devices, AGO first scatters the MTC devices over a GP interval, and then automatically adjusts ACB parameters according to the load conditions. By doing so, AGO achieves high-channel access probability for MTC devices. Simulation results show that this method is superior to the GP and Pre-backoff (PBO) mechanisms in terms of success and collision probability, average access latency and resource utilization rate.