Wireless M2M Communications

Machine type communication is a very active area under discussion in 3GPP for integration within the LTE/LTE-Advanced framework and more generally within ETSI, primarily within RAN2 and the ETSI M2M forum. In one of the recent studies for LTE Release 11 related to radio access improvement for machine-type communications (MTC), overhead and latency reduction are identified as the first priority. This type of application poses many interesting problems  as the current configurations of mobile networks are designed primarily for human-to-human (H2H) communications targeting voice/multimedia transmissions with a continuous flow of packets, which are not perfectly suitable for MTC traffic pattern (e.g. on-off-active type) with different quality of service (QoS) requirements.

Research Problem

Our past and current reseach topics on low-cost LTE/LTE-advanced for machine type communication includes

• Traffic modeling and in the dimensioning of the underlying radio bearers and the related PHY/MAC procedures (HARQ, adaptive coding and modulation, MAC layer scheduling)
• Design of low-layer signaling which allows for extremely short acquisition times for event-driven traffic and switching between idle and active communication states, particularly in the Uplink direction.