Enhanced Radio Access and Data Transmission Procedures Facilitating Industry-Compliant Machine-Type Communications over LTE-Based 5G Networks

Priority alarm messages for MTC in industry applications require guaranteed delays of a few dozen milliseconds only, with super-critical applications even calling for below-10-ms access. With the best state-of-the-art cellular systems barely able to meet below-50-ms delays, in this article we propose some important improvements to the 3GPP MTC access procedure allowing a significantly performance boost for alarm messages. Notably, the first method encompasses an SMS-like approach where the alarm is transmitted in a secure and backward-compatible form over the connection-establishing access channel, thus allowing the data transmission to be terminated significantly earlier and to support emerging critical alarm messages. The second method uses a secure and previously agreed sequence of random access codes to convey super-critical alerts within a few milliseconds, and is thus able to support emergency alarm messages. Both methods not only achieve control-compliant access delays but are also highly energy efficient, thus allowing long battery lifetimes and hence quicker uptake by the industry.