Congestion Control in the context of Machine Type Communication in Long Term Evolution Networks: a Dynamic Load Balancing Approach

Machine Type Communication (MTC) is the automatic exchange of information through a network, including devices or machines, without human intervention. MTC applications aim to endow the machine with intelligence, in order to automate everyday life process. Some of the more established application areas are: health care, city automation, smart energy, positioning and tracking, security and surveillance, etc. MTC devices are generally spread in a wide area and should communicate through widely deployed networks. LTE cellular networks are choosen to support MTC applications since they offer a large coverage, and they are all-IP networks. The benefits of such a deployment are for both MTC application (more opportunities) and LTE networks (more revenues). However, the deployment of MTC applications over LTE networks incurs many requirements and causes challenges. The most important of them is the problem of congestion which is the focus of our work. Indeed, when the huge number of the MTC devices communicate at the same time, congestion occurs in different nodes of the network. In the present work, we propose a dynamic Load balancing and admission control algorithm which deals with the congestion in LTE networks. We balance the load among MMEs (Mobility Management Entities) before moving to the admission control so as to avoid congestion at the core network nodes. Through our discrete event simulator that we developped in C++, we show the efficiency of our solution since we obtain good simulation results, with different traffic patterns.