Massive Machine Type Communications over 5G using Lean Protocols and Edge Proxies

Abstract

In the foreseeable future, massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) is slated to become a dominating communication paradigm in Industry 4.0, eHealth, connected homes and smart cities. This can pose significant challenges to cellular networks as both the signaling and power overhead for connection management and the communication tax in the form of protocol headers can no longer be amortized against infrequent small data transfers from very large number of low capability devices as is common with mMTC. The impending arrival of 5G provides the perfect opportunity to evolve cellular networks for mMTC. In this paper, we identify the underlying issues and propose novel architectural enhancements and protocol optimizations for reducing the mismatch between mMTC and cellular networks. This includes lean connectionless signaling protocols for network access and core networking, low overhead data protocols optimized for small packet transmission and mMTC Edge Proxies for offloading both processing and networking for devices with limited capabilities. We show using numerical data, that the proposed solution realizes achieves significant capacity gains for short mMTC packets applications when compared to legacy air-interfaces and commonly used networking protocols. More specifically, the proposed solution is capable of supporting 4 times more users than legacy LTE while showing gains of 25% and 16% over TCP/IP and IoT protocols such as CoAP over 6LowPAN, respectively. Finally, our solution is able to provide communication latencies under 10 ms with low jitter, which makes it a good candidate for industrial IoT applications.