• ETRI Journal
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.546-557
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• 2017

In a long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) system, the traffic overload of machine type communication devices is a challenge because too many devices attempt to access a base station (BS) simultaneously in a short period of time. We discuss the challenge of the gap between the theoretical maximum throughput and the actual throughput. A gap occurs when the BS cannot change the number of preambles for a random access channel (RACH) until multiple numbers of RACHs are completed. In addition, a preamble partition approach is proposed in this paper that uses two groups of preambles to reduce this gap. A performance evaluation shows that the proposed approach increases the average throughput. For 100,000 devices in a cell, the throughput is increased by 29.7% to 114.4% and 23.0% to 91.3% with uniform and Beta-distributed arrivals of devices, respectively.