A congestion reduction mechanism using D2D cooperative relay for M2M communication in the LTE-A cellular network

The Long Term Evolution-advanced cellular network is designed for human-to-human communication. When a large number of machine-to-machine (M2M) devices are trying to access the network simultaneously, it leads to a low random access (RA) successful rate and high congestion problem, which may cause the waste of radio resources, packet loss, latency, extra power consumption, and the worst, M2M service error. There is an urge to propose an efficient method for M2M communication on the LTE-A network to resolve the congestion problem. In this paper, we propose a congestion reduction mechanism, which can analyze and model the RA procedure on the Long Term Evolution-advanced network, to find out the collapse point in the RA procedure and then design a scheme named device-to-device cooperative relay scheme to relieve the congestion problem. Meanwhile, this work also adds a relay access barring algorithm to improve performance and an RA resource separation mechanism for human-to-human communication. The proposed method can effectively reduce the network congestion problem. Simulation results show that the network throughput and the congestion can be significantly improved using the proposed mechanism.