Hybrid S-ALOHA/TDMA Protocol for LTE/LTE-A Networks with Coexistence of H2H and M2M Traffic

The machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is featured by tremendous number of devices, small data transmission, and large uplink to downlink traffic ratio. The massive access requests generated by M2M devices would result in the current medium access control (MAC) protocol in LTE/LTE-A networks suffering from physical random access channel (PRACH) overload, high signaling overhead, and resource underutilization. As such, fairness should be carefully considered when M2M traffic coexists with human-to-human (H2H) traffic. To tackle these problems, we propose an adaptive Slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) and time division multiple access (TDMA) hybrid protocol. In particular, the proposed hybrid protocol divides the reserved uplink resource blocks (RBs) in a transmission cycle into the S-ALOHA part for M2M traffic with small-size packets and the TDMA part for H2H traffic with large-size packets. Adaptive resource allocation and access class barring (ACB) are exploited and optimized to maximize the channel utility with fairness constraint. Moreover, an upper performance bound for the proposed hybrid protocol is provided by performing the system equilibrium analysis. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with pure S-ALOHA and pure TDMA protocol under a target fairness constraint of 0.9, our proposed hybrid protocol can improve the capacity by at least 9.44% when 12:1:1λλ= and by at least 20.53% when 12:10:1λλ=, where 12,λλ are traffic arrival rates of M2M and H2H traffic, respectively.