Aggregation and Trunking of M2M Traffic via D2D Connections

TL;DR

This paper proposes a D2D-based aggregation strategy for M2M traffic in cellular networks, inspired by TRS, to reduce congestion and improve resource allocation, highlighting a trade-off between latency and power consumption.

Contribution

It introduces a novel D2D aggregation approach for M2M traffic, leveraging TRS concepts to enhance network efficiency and manage massive IoT device connectivity.

Findings

Aggregation reduces access congestion.

Lower latency increases power consumption.

D2D approach improves resource utilization.

Abstract

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications is one of the key enablers of the Internet of Things (IoT). Billions of devices are expected to be deployed in the next future for novel M2M applications demanding ubiquitous access and global connectivity. In order to cope with the massive number of machines, there is a need for new techniques to coordinate the access and allocate the resources. Although the majority of the proposed solutions are focused on the adaptation of the traditional cellular networks to the M2M traffic patterns, novel approaches based on the direct communication among nearby devices may represent an effective way to avoid access congestion and cell overload. In this paper, we propose a new strategy inspired by the classical Trunked Radio Systems (TRS), exploiting the Device-to-Device (D2D) connectivity between cellular users and Machine-Type Devices (MTDs). The aggregation of the locally generated packets is performed by a user device, which aggregates the machine-type data, supplements it with its own data and transmits all of them to the Base Station. We observe a fundamental trade-off between latency and the transmit power needed to deliver the aggregate traffic, in a sense that lower latency requires increase in the transmit power.