A flexible M2M radio resource sharing scheme in LTE networks within an H2H/M2M coexistence scenario

The introduction of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to long term evolution and advanced (LTE-A) cellular networks can significantly degrade the performance of existing human-to-human (H2H) communications. In this paper, we consider a shared channel resource allocation in an H2H/M2M coexistence scenario. We first formulate the resource sharing problem between M2M and H2H communications as a bipartite graph (BG). In addition, we propose a power control scheme for the concurrently transmitting M2M nodes to mitigate the H2H performance degradation following a probability that is set based on a proportional integrative derivative (PID) controller reflecting the interference level. The impact of M2M radio resource allocation on the performance of conventional scheduling algorithms optimally designed for H2H communications in terms of data rate and fairness is evaluated. Simulation results are encouraging and our proposed scheme succeeds in reducing the impact of M2M communications on H2H services in terms of data rate and fairness.

I. Introduction

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications (also known as machine-type-communications (MTC)) in long term evolution networks and its advancements (LTE-A) have emerged as a new paradigm that enables the connection of machines or devices without any human intervention. Thus, the autonomous connection of devices with MTC will facilitate the emergence of numerous applications in a wide range of domains, such as transportation, health care, smart energy, city automation and surveillance [1], [2].