Performance Analysis of Group Paging for Machine-Type Communications in LTE Networks

Machine-type communication (MTC) is a crucial service for next-generation cellular networks. Mass access to the network by MTC devices may result in the overload of radio access networks (RANs) and degrade the service quality of human-to-human communication. Group paging is one of the mechanisms proposed to alleviate the RAN-overload problem. This paper presents an analytical model based on a recursive contending-users estimation (RCE) method proposed in the literature to derive the performance metrics of collision probability, access success probability, average access delay, statistics of preamble transmissions, statistics of access delay, and utilization of random-access opportunities (RAOs) for group paging with various combinations of group sizes and reserved radio resources in a paging access interval. The optimal group size and required RAOs are subsequently derived based on the given target access success probability. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed model can accurately estimate the performance of group paging.