Impact of M2M traffic on human-type communication users on the LTE uplink channel

The worldwide markets for Machine-type Communication (MTC) over cellular networks are expected to grow in the incoming years. However, since MTC is quite different than existing Human-type Communication (HTC), it poses significant challenges to the cellular networks. Large number of MTC devices are anticipated to be operating in the future Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, bringing several service requirements. The LTE standard suffers from excessive Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH) overhead associated with the radio resource allocation method for small, sporadic traffic per terminal which is the nature of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) traffic. The rigid Quality of Service (QoS) support framework of LTE for voice and data services also fails to address specific QoS requirements of M2M traffic. This paper focuses on describing the impact of M2M traffic on the performance of the HTC users in LTE Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) uplink. Simulation results show the impact of M2M traffic on the performance of different types of Human-to-Human (H2H) services (Voice-over-IP (VoIP), video and CBR), when using a QoS-aware packet scheduling. Although MTC in LTE networks impacts HTC, the utilization of a semi-persistent scheduling scheme to VoIP traffic can reduce such impact.