A Reconfigurable Access Scheme for Critical Massive MTC Networks With Device Clusters

This paper presents a reconfigurable access scheme for critical massive machine-type communication networks where the access point (AP) is equipped with a large-scale antenna array, and devices can move and form clusters. Devices transmit alarm and regular packets to the AP by two-hop relay connections via cluster leaders. The delay constraints of alarm packets are guaranteed by considering jointly the effective bandwidth and effective capacity with the success probability threshold while the aggregate age of information (AoI) of regular packets is minimized by maximizing their AoI-weighted throughput. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms random and round-robin scheduling in terms of minimizing AoI, and it guarantees the delay constraints in contrast to the baselines without delay consideration. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can dynamically distribute resources to serve alarm and regular packet transmissions based on the stringency of delay constraints.