Coverage and Rate Analysis for Facilitating Machine-to-Machine Communication in LTE-A Networks Using Device-to-Device Communication

• Published in: IEEE transactions on mobile computing 2017-11, Vol.16 (11), p.3014-3027
• Main Authors: Swain, Siba Narayan, Thakur, Rahul, Chebiyyam, SivaRam Murthy
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: average rate; Cellular networks; Communication; coverage; D2D communication; Device-to-device communication; Feasibility studies; Infrastructure; Long Term Evolution; LTE-A network; M2M communication; Machine-to-machine communications; Mobile communication systems; Network topology; Routing; Spread spectrum communication; stochastic geometry; Stochastic processes; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 1536-1233; 1558-0660
• DOI: 10.1109/TMC.2017.2684162

With a wide range of applications, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication has become an emerging technology for connecting generic machines to the Internet. To ensure ubiquity in connections across all machines, it is necessary to have a standard infrastructure, such as 3GPP LTE-A network infrastructure, that facilitates such type of communications. However, owing to the huge scale of machines to be deployed in near future and the nature of data transactions, ensuring ubiquitous connections among all the machines will be difficult. Solutions that not only maintain connectivity but also route machine data in a cost effective manner are the need of the hour. In this context, it has been suggested that Device-to-Device (D2D) communication can play a very important role in expanding network coverage and routing the data between source-destination machine pairs. In this paper, we conduct a feasibility study to highlight the impact of multi-hop D2D communication in increasing the network coverage and average rate of a Machine Type Communication (MTC) device. We present a stochastic geometry based framework to analyze the coverage probability and average data rate of a three-hop M2M network deployed along with User Equipments (UEs) and conduct extensive simulations to study the system performance. Our simulation results show that the three-hop M2M network formed from out-of-range MTC devices and UEs can significantly improve the coverage and average rate of the entire network. Due to the mobility of users in the network, design of robust routing mechanisms in such a time evolving network becomes difficult. Hence, we suggest the use of space-time graph built from the predicted user locations to design a cost efficient multi-hop D2D topology that enables routing of MTC data to its destination.