Temporal load balancing of time-driven machine type communications in mobile core networks

Machine Type Communications (MTC) has been paid much attention as a new communication paradigm to increase mobile network traffic. Most of MTC terminals are time-driven, that is, they send and receive data periodically. Therefore, network access requests on mobile core networks are concentrated at a specific timing, which results in instantaneous increase in network load. Considering the fact that such time-driven MTC would accept a certain amount of latency in their cyclic communication, in this paper, we propose a scheduling method of communication timings of time-driven MTC terminals to mitigate traffic concentration. We extend the standardized back-off mechanism of 3GPP to configure the back-off time length for each terminal to decrease the number of concurrent bearers in the network, while satisfying requirements on communication latency. We compare proposed methods by simulation experiments and reveal that we can achieve almost zero access rejections at reasonable communication quality by a simple timeslot selection algorithm when the core network maintain the timeslot assignment status for accommodated User Equipments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal to alleviate short-term congestion of mobile core networks by MTC with TDMA-like network control.