Group-Based Signaling and Access Control for Cellular Machine-to-Machine Communication

Global connectivity and broad coverage of cellular networks constitute a platform for ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) service provisioning on a large scale. However, the access attempt to the radio access network from a massive number of devices demands new cellular access mechanism and signaling design to avoid congestion of control channels. We propose group-based access and signaling policies through a two-level device partitioning, namely, paging groups and access groups. Group paging enables the base station to coordinate access to the network and hence control the random access channel (RACH) overload. However, unlike the conventional scheme where each individual device attempts access to the network, our proposed group-based access mechanism delegates the random access procedure of the devices in an access group to a designated device, referred to as group delegate. In addition, we develop signaling schemes that enable resource allocation at the level of access groups for direct data report as well as a group-based connection via group delegate. Numerical results show that the group access procedure achieves significantly smaller access delay than the conventional access scheme. It is also shown that the group-based signaling policies require signaling overhead proportional to the number of group delegates instead of the number of devices. The proposed group-based schemes enable scaling the number of devices paged simultaneously while controlling the access signaling congestion, access delay, and overhead. Furthermore, the group-based connection enables more resource re- use and hence more efficient resource usage for data transmission.