M2M Potentials in logistics and transportation industry

All over the world, road congestion is among the most prevalent transport challenges usually in urban environments which not only increases fuel consumption and emission of harmful gases, but also causes stress for the drivers. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) enables a better use of the infrastructure by connecting vehicles to other vehicles as well as infrastructure and thus delivers a faster communication opportunity to ensure safe and secure driving. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is one of the latest information and communication technologies which offers ubiquitous connectivity among several smart devices. The use of mobile (cellular) M2M communications has emerged due to the wide range, high reliability, increased data rates, decreased costs as well as easy and short-term deployment opportunities. Since the radio spectrum is a scarce resource, M2M traffic can potentially degrade the performance of mobile networks due to the large number of devices sending small-sized data. This paper presents an efficient data multiplexing scheme by using Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) Relay Nodes, which aggregates M2M traffic to maximize radio resource utilization. Extensive system-level simulations are performed using an LTE-Advanced-based model developed in the RIVERBED modeler to evaluate the performance of the proposed data multiplexing scheme. Simulation results show that approximately 40 % more smart M2M devices used in ITS and logistics are served per LTE-Advanced cell under the present system settings.