Control Channel Load Balancing in Narrow Band Cellular IoT Systems Supporting Coverage Class

In order to support various Internet of Things (IoT) services, 3GPP is working to standardize cellular IoT (CIoT) systems based on the existing GSM & GPRS networks. CIoT systems are aiming to support the massive number of devices, extend the network coverage, and improve the battery life of IoT devices. Furthermore, in order to support more than 50,000 CIoT devices, CIoT systems categorize the devices with different coverage classes and manage control and data channels. However, as a massive number of devices will be deployed in system coverage, traffic loads for each coverage class might be unequal and difficult to release the traffic overload. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel load balancing scheme for control channel in the CIoT systems. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can accommodate system loads quickly and effectively.