A Survey of Traffic Issues in Machine-to-Machine Communications Over LTE

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, also referred to as Internet of Things (IoT), is a global network of devices such as sensors, actuators, and smart appliances which collect information, and can be controlled and managed in real time over the Internet. Due to their universal coverage, cellular networks and the Internet together offer the most promising foundation for the implementation of M2M communication. With the worldwide deployment of the fourth generation (4G) of cellular networks, the long-term evolution (LTE) and LTE-advanced standards have defined several quality-of-service classes to accommodate the M2M traffic. However, cellular networks are mainly optimized for human-to-human (H2H) communication. The characteristics of M2M traffic are different from the human-generated traffic and consequently create sever problems in both radio access and the core networks (CNs). This survey on M2M communication in LTE/LTE-A explores the issues, solutions, and the remaining challenges to enable and improve M2M communication over cellular networks. We first present an overview of the LTE networks and discuss the issues related to M2M applications on LTE. We investigate the traffic issues of M2M communications and the challenges they impose on both access channel and traffic channel of a radio access network and the congestion problems they create in the CN. We present a comprehensive review of the solutions for these problems which have been proposed in the literature in recent years and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each method. The remaining challenges are also discussed in detail.