A novel RACH mechanism for machine type communications in cellular networks

Abstract

Machine type communications (MTC) is one of the key technologies in the upcoming 5G cellular networks. Under MTC, millions of MTC devices try to access the cellular base station. The existing random access channel (RACH) mechanisms are not suitable for such large number of devices. Thus, 3GPP has proposed an extended access barring (EAB) mechanism to address this problem. However, it has been shown in the literature that the RACH success rate of EAB can be improved further. Hence, in this work, we propose a novel RACH mechanism based on successive interference cancellation (SIC) that results in higher RACH success rate. Through extensive numerical results, we show that the proposed mechanism significantly outperforms the existing RACH mechanisms for MTC in cellular networks.