Machine-type communications have suffered serious congestion, overload, and poor quality of service problems in cellular networks, since the cellular networks are designed for human-to-human communications. Moreover, current solutions just focus on the congestion for single base station and cannot adaptively work in the dynamic and complex conditions. In this article, we provide an autonomous and adaptive attractor-selection-based congestion control scheme for massive access from machine-type communication devices based on the resource separation scheme. First, we introduce a feasible and self-adaptive extended attractor-selection mechanism to decide which base station to be chosen. Simultaneously, an effective estimation algorithm for the traffic load of base stations is also designed to represent the network traffic load without frequent information exchanges among devices or base stations. With the available access resources and estimated traffic load taken into consideration, massive access attempts can receive the decisions via the broadcast and adaptively choose proper stations for alleviation of the congestion and overload. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed attractor-selection-based congestion control scheme achieves better performance in terms of average access delay, collision probability, and throughput of the whole system, adaptively accommodating to unpredictable environments under cellular networks.
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