Smart devices and mobile traffic growth toward Internet application has created a wide variety of new promising services over 3GPP-LTE networks. Small data transmission is defined as the service feature that the devices send or receive its data at the order of 1K bytes. In this paper, we analyze the performance of small data transmission schemes in LTE networks which correspond to connectionless-mode, connected-mode, and control-plane approach scheme. We estimate the power consumption at each state of small-data-transmission phase, i.e. random-access, signaling-exchange, and data transmission part, by considering the uplink power control in transmission and average dwelling time of each phase. The effectiveness of selected schemes is presented by energy efficiency considering different networks resources, offered loads, packet size and packet inter-arrival time. The results also present the contribution of energy consumption by each transmission phase (i.e. random access procedure,connection establishment, data transmission, and timer) for each small data transmission scheme. The results reveal that “Control-plane approach’ and ‘RACH-based small data transmission’ scheme are most efficient approach for short packet transmission, i.e. less than 100 bytes and 1K bytes respectively. Yet, another schemes, i.e. ‘Short-live connection mode’ or ‘Keeping the device longer in connected mode’ transmission may be an efficient approach for infrequent/frequent and long packet transmission, i.e. 10K to 100K bytes respectively, by considering an optimal inactivity timer setting.

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