Designing Efficient Access Control to Comply Massive-Multiservice IoT over Cellular Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) has come in reality to improve our living quality. Automation is embraced in all the possible business verticals that have diverse communication needs ranged from static devices’ sporadic transmission to mobile devices’ every minute transmission. Despite, there are many technologies available today to support IoT services; cellular systems can play a vital role for IoT services, like wearables, vehicular, and industrial IoT, rollout which have either mobility or security concern. IoT services generated traffic are foreseen as a sporadic-bursty traffic. As the cellular networks are designed to serve continuous data traffic, the existing system’s access control mechanism cannot efficiently conform to the burstiness of traffic. This limits the scope of the network scalability in terms of simultaneous serving devices’ capacity. Also, this bursty pattern can extensively increase the rate of network’s congestion incident. In this thesis, we focus on these underlying challenges to support a large number of heterogeneous IoT services with existing services over the same radio network. An important question for supporting IoT services over cellular networks is how detrimental are the effects of IoT services on other services of cellular networks. This dissertation seeks to answer this with quantitative results to indicate the real constraints of existing networks. An important conclusion is that existing cellular system is incompetent to support bursty arrival of massive IoT devices in terms of radio networks’ access control plane’s scalability. Therefore, this dissertation presents solutions to overcome the identified limitations of access control planes. To improve the performance of the access control plane, we incorporate a vertical core network controlled group management scheme that can assure the operator’s granular control over capillary gateways. Besides, this introduces a unique handover opportunity between cellular and capillary network vertices. Then, we present a simple but efficient initial access mechanism to overcome the initial access collision at the very early stage. Finally, we show the impact of access collision and retransmission on the initial access resource dimensioning. We present a practical traffic model that is realistic for the traffic scenario for mixed-traffic. Our presented results and analysis depict the trade-offs between access rate, retransmission and resource allocation over time and frequency. Our results reveal that with proposed schemes of the cellular system’s access control plane can be scalable and resilient to accommodate a large number of IoT devices without incurring extra delay or need of resources to the system.