A Hybrid Uplink Scheduling Approach for Supporting Mission-Critical Smart Grid applications in Commercial 4G Cellular Networks

Cellular-based M2M communications is one of the key IoT enabling technologies with huge market potential for cellular service providers deploying 4G LTE networks. This paper presents a new LTE UL scheduling strategy that can efficiently manages a massive number of M2M devices and applications with QoS guarantees along with typical adequate H2H services with minimum DL control channel signaling exchange. Specifically, we propose a simple hybrid LTE UL scheduling approach that utilizes the typical LTE's dynamic scheduling for supporting H2H services and Semi-Persistent Scheduling (SPS) for supporting a massive number of smart M2M devices running mission-critical IoT applications that always require persistent radio resource allocation at regular interval. The proposed approach fully conforms to LTE's signaling and QoS standards, eloquently mitigates the PDCCH congestion while adequately satisfying the stringent latency and QoS requirements of mission-critical IoT applications as well as H2H services.