Performance Evaluation for Energy-Harvesting Machine-Type Communication in LTE-A System

To explore the energy efficient Machine-Type Communication (MTC) for 5G cellular systems, we developed a simulation platform to investigate the complete uplink procedures of energy-harvesting MTC devices in LTE-A (Long Term Evolution Advanced) system. Though the 3rd Generation Partnership (3GPP) has worked on LTE-A cellular standards in support of MTC transmission, the standards have not taken energy-harvesting MTC devices into their scope. Energy-harvesting technology can be the candidate to support the MTC features by allowing the devices to harvest ambient energy and support their own power usage without manual upgrade. The proposed Energy-Aware LTE-A scheme, serving as power control and admission control, prevents the devices from building the network connections greedily but ending up with energy shortage and packet loss. This scheme not only can reduce the contention level of control channels but also can decrease energy wastage on network entry procedures, thereby improving the overall energy efficiency.