Novel Packet Arrival Rate Estimator for LTE-Based Random Access

Owing to the increasing demand for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, random access is being intensively researched. With M2M communications, numerous devices can transmit random access packets simultaneously. This results in congestion in random access and degrades its performance. To control congestion scenarios, the packet arrival rate of random access must be obtained with a short delay and high accuracy. In this paper, a new estimator is proposed to obtain the packet arrival rate in a long-term evolution system. The packet arrival rate of random access is computed using the estimated number of random access packets in each slot. Using the proposed estimator, the number of random access packets is estimated based on the received energy vector for sequences and the number of detected sequences. Analysis and simulations show that the proposed estimator presents better performance for determining the number of random access packets than conventional approaches.