Performance Analysis of Periodic Cellular-IoT Communication with Immediate Release of Radio Resources

Mobile cellular networks are now serving all kinds of Internet of Things (IoT) communications. Since current contention-based random access and radio resource allocation are optimized for traditional human communications, massive IoT communications cannot be efficiently accommodated. For this reason, standardization activities for connecting IoT devices, such as Cellular-IoT (C-IoT), have emerged. However, there have been few studies devoted to the evaluation of the performance of the C-IoT communications with periodic data transmissions, despite their being the common characteristics of many IoT communications.Herein, we evaluate the capacity of mobile cellular networks in accommodating periodic C-IoT communications, focusing on differences in performance between LTE and Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) networks. To achieve this, we conduct end-to-end performance analyses of both control and data planes, including the random access procedure, radio resource allocation, and bearer establishment in EPC network. Moreover, we determined the effect of immediate release of radio resources considered in 3GPP. Numerical evaluation results show that NB-IoT can accommodate more IoT devices than LTE, although this results in significant latency in data transmission. Furthermore, we find that the number of IoT devices that can be accommodated increases up to 20.7 times with immediate release of radio resources.