Adaptive Load Control for IoT Based on Satellite Communications

The Internet Of Things (IoT) market is growing more and more every year. Today, the number of IoT devices is estimated around 8 billion but forecasts announce 20 billion devices for 2020. Terrestrial or satellite communications systems are already deployed to answer the connectivity need. These systems rely on a Random Access CHannel (RACH) used either to send resource allocation requests or directly the useful message. Because of the number of IoT devices, the overload on the RACH is an emerging issue since it may cause a service outage. This is especially the case for IoT satellite systems because of the wide area covered by a single satellite. The Access Class Barring (ACB) is the load control mechanism used within the Narrow Band IoT. Unfortunately, no method was specified to compute the load control parameters. In this paper, in the context of a satellite IoT system, we propose a method to compute dynamically ACB based load control parameters. Thanks to our method, the load control mechanism reach excellent results regarding transmission reliability and energy consumption for various traffic scenarios.