Opportunities of hybrid random access protocols for M2M communications in LTE/LTE-A networks

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications on Long-term evolution (LTE) networks form a substantial part for the Internet-of-things (IoT). The random access procedure is the first step for M2M devices to access network resources. Many researchers have attempted to improve the efficiency of the random access procedure. This work revisits the performance of the hybrid random access protocols which combine congestion control techniques with collision resolution techniques. In particular, we investigate two hybrid protocols. The first one combines the pre-backoff (PBO) with tree random access (TRA), and the second one combines dynamic access barring (DAB) with TRA. The probability analysis is presented for both protocols. The performance is evaluated based on the access success rate, the mean throughput, the mean delay, the collision rate and the mean retransmissions. The simulation results show that the hybrid protocols achieve the highest success rate and throughput with moderate delay and low collision rates with a lower mean number of retransmissions compared to three benchmarks that apply either a congestion control or a collision resolution. The opportunities of future developments of hybrid protocols are listed at the end of this paper to highlight the issues that could be investigated to improve the performance of hybrid random access protocols.