Machine type communications in 3GPP networks: potential, challenges, and solutions

With a wide range of potential applications, Machine Type Communication (MTC) or Machine to Machine (M2M) communication is gaining a tremendous interest among mobile network operators, equipment vendors, MTC specialist companies, and research bodies. To facilitate convergence among these different stakeholders, different standardization groups started working on MTC. This article introduces briefly some of the relevant activities, with a focus on those related to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The article focuses on two important aspects of MTC devices, currently discussed in 3GPP as part of its Release 10. They are subscription control and network congestion/overload control. For the latter, a new solution based on bulk signaling handling is proposed.