Analytic Framework for Advanced Radio Access Protocols for the Internet of Things

Core of this paper are a analytic framework to evaluate the performance of radio access protocols and its validation through a comparison with computer simulations. We apply our method in the context of the future generation of cellular networks, also known as 5G, that is supposed to integrate the traditional broadband services with the Internet of Things (IoT), characterized by sporadic transmissions of small data packets in the uplink. Current cellular network technologies, like the Long Term Evolution (LTE), are not capable of supporting IoT traffic efficiently since they use a huge amount of signaling traffic relative to the actual payload size, for the connection setup as well as for requesting and granting of radio resources. Short range radio technologies likeWireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and Zigbee are limited to local networks and cannot provide the required reliability in many cases. In this paper we introduce an innovative radio access protocol for sporadic transmissions of small data packets which is resource-efficient in terms of throughput and delay, and suitable for application in 5G networks. We compare this protocol with LTE employing our analytic framework and show its benefit primarily with respect to significantly reduced signaling overhead and access latency.