Congestion-aware MTC device triggering

This paper describes a device triggering optimization technique for controlling system overload when deploying massive Machine Type Communication (MTC) devices in 3GPP-based cellular networks. Triggering a large number of MTC devices can dramatically overload the underlying transport network system and incur congestion in both the Radio Access Network (RAN) and the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). The proposed solution aims at controlling the rate of device trigger requests that MTC servers can generate in order to reduce the system overload. For this purpose, we propose that the Mobility Management Entity (MME), or an alike core network node, computes the device trigger rate that alleviates congestion, and communicates this value to the MTC-Interworking Function (MTC-IWF) element that enforces MTC traffic control, via admission control or data aggregation, on the device trigger request rate received from the different MTC servers. The proposed solution is evaluated through computer simulations and encouraging results are obtained.