Analysis of small packet traffic support in LTE

One of the most important features of the next generation cellular network, commonly referred to as 5G, is the native support of Internet of Things (IoT) traffic, in order to overcome the issues of the actual cellular standard, the Long Term Evolution (LTE), in managing this kind of traffic. However, the IoT market growth is so fast that a seamless integration of IoT traffic from 4G to 5G should be provided. In this context, first of all we tailor the LTE physical channels to the case of small packet traffic. Then, we design a mathematical framework to analyze the performance of two possible variants of the LTE radio access protocol to efficiently support the IoT.