Traffic aggregation for overload control in LTE-based machine type communications

Machine-Type Communication (MTC) is the communication between machines through either wired or wireless links without human intervention. The LTE cellular networks with global connectivity and wide range of coverage provide infrastructure for developing MTC applications. However, the differences between conventional communications and MTC bring new technical challenges to the LTE. In this article, we investigated the problem of congestion in LTE caused by MTC, and proposed a traffic aggregation solution that aggregates the traffic generated by massive MTC devices on local side to reduce the total access attempts to the LTE base station. We evaluated the performance of the proposed scheme thru the simulation, the results show the remarkable performance improvement in reducing the number of access attempts while not causing too much overhead on the devices.