Challenges and Promising Solutions of Addressing, Congestion Control, and Power Saving Key Issues for 3GPP Machine Type Communications
25 July 2011
The Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has made grand efforts on challenges and solutions for supporting both higher and lower (air interface) layer connections between the Machine-type communication (MTC) controller and MTC devices. Machine-type communication will have to handle a number of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and identifiers up to two orders of magnitude higher than for human-to-human communications, which creates great challenges in many aspects for providing efficient and feasible approaches to LTE-A technologies. A number of core challenges have been introduced as key issues to call for efficient solutions in 3GPP TR 23.888. This paper discusses three classes of the key issues and relevant promising solutions: addressing and naming (identifiers) of MTC devices, overload and congestion control, and power saving. For the power saving key issues, we provide a set of efficient solutions with notable performance benefits.