Spatial Group Based Random Access for M2M Communications

Abstract

We expect that the number of machine-to-machine (M2M) devices will rapidly increase in the near future due to a growing demand for a wide range of M2M applications such as e-health, public safety, surveillance, remote maintenance and control, and smart metering. Therefore, the future cellular networks should accommodate a large number of M2M devices and their random access (RA) requests at a specific time instant. In this letter, we propose a novel RA scheme to effectively increase the number of available preambles for the future M2M communication environment. The proposed scheme provides additional preambles by spatially partitioning a cell coverage into multiple group regions and reducing cyclic shift size in RA preambles. As a result, the proposed RA scheme can accommodate a significantly larger number of machine nodes with much lower collision probability and shorter random access delay, compared to a conventional RA scheme.