II. RELATED WORK
4G technology is meant to provide what is known as “ultrabroadband”
access for mobile devices. LTE advanced, was
submitted as a candidate for the 4G system to ITU-T (ITU
Telecommunication Standardization Sector) in 2009. It was
approved into IMT Advanced and was finalized by the 3rd
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a major
enhancement of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard in
March 2011[1].
In [2] an overview of the current state of standardization
efforts in M2M communication is given. Lien et al. [3]
provide an overview of the network architecture and features
of M2M communications in 3GPP, and identify potential
issues including physical layer transmissions, the random
access procedure, and radio resources allocation. They also
propose a solution to provide QoS guarantees to facilitate
M2M applications with hard timing constraints. In [4] a
Mobility architecture, IoMANETS, is proposed for Wireless
M2M networks. The design provides a fault tolerant solution
to the mobility issue by allowing mobile nodes to seamlessly
connect to M2M-Internet of Things infrastructure. The
assumptions are that fixed nodes are connected to the internet
with either IPv4 or IPv6 and the mobile nodes have IEEE
802.15.4 adapters operating a 6LowPAN IP stack. IoMANETs
facilitates the reachability of the device using indirections
based on the original global address. Our approach was not
focused on fault tolerant connectivity of mobile nodes but was
rather on QoS issues in connecting WSN to 4G devices.
Probably the work that is most similar to ours was proposed
by Zhang et al. [5]. In their work they examined network
38th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks
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convergence between mobile cellular networks and wireless
sensor networks. They proposed that the mobile terminals in
MCN act as both sensor nodes and gateways for WSN in the
converged networks. On the other hand, we proposed a
separate device that will serve as a dual mode gateway and
protocol converter (adapter). In addition, we specifically
address LTE-A while the authors in [5] do not specify the
cellular technology involved in their proposed converged
network.