Latency for Real-Time Machine-to-Machine Communication in LTE-Based System Architecture

Machine-to-machine communication has attracted a lot of interest in the mobile communication industry and is under standardization process in 3GPP. Of particular interest is LTE-Advanced support for various M2M service requirements and efficient management and handling of a huge number of machines as mobile subscribers. In addition to the higher throughput, one of the main advantages of LTE/LTE-A in comparison with the previous cellular networks is the reduced transmission latency, which makes this type of networks very attractive for real-time mobile M2M communication scenarios. This paper presents a M2M system architecture based on LTE/LTE-A and highlights the delays associated with each part of the system. Three real-time M2M applications are analyzed and the main latency bottlenecks are identified. Proposals on how the latency can be further reduced are described.