A Novel Virtual Small Cell-Based Group-Paging Scheme for Massive MTCs over LTE Networks

Group paging (GP) is one of the improvements proposed by 3GPP on the radio access network (RAN) of LTE/LTE-A to enable machine-type communications (MTCs). Nevertheless, the conventional GP might still pose an overload on RAN when a massive number of paged MTC devices trigger the LTE's contention-based random access procedure (RAP) in a highly synchronized manner. This paper, based on the concept of Virtual Small Cells (VSCs), introduces a new RAP for MTC devices to solve the RAN overload issue in the group-paging process caused by the massive access. The proposed VSC-based RAP is designed based on the group-based access manner and an adaptive access barring algorithm, which efficiently controls the access rate in each VSC during the paging process. Computer simulation shows that, in the context of massive MTCs, the proposed VSC-based scheme can significantly outperform the conventional GP in terms of success access rate and average delay of successfully-accessed devices.