Distributed Caching Enabled Peak Traffic Reduction in Ultra-Dense IoT Networks

The proliferation of massive machine-type communications devices and their random and intermittent transmissions have brought the new challenge of sporadic access-network congestion in ultra-dense Internet of Things (IoT) networks. To address this issue, we propose an innovative approach of peak traffic reduction within the access network by utilizing distributed cache of IoT devices to coordinate their sporadic transmissions. The proposed technique is realized by employing a novel uplink transmission scheduling based on delay adaptation, in which distributed IoT devices adjust their transmission timings by utilizing embedded caching. An optimization problem is formulated for the minimization of peak data rate demand subject to delay tolerance levels, and is solved for the 3GPP-based traffic models by employing a gradient descent-based algorithm. Our results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the peak data traffic in ultra-dense IoT networks.