An LTE Matching-Based Scheduling Scheme for Critical-MTC with Shortened Transmission Time Intervals

Shortened transmission time interval (sTTI) is considered one of the most significant enhancements to evolve the current Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks to fulfill the 5G requirement of supporting critical machine-type communications (cMTC). However, scheduling the sporadic cMTC and the data-intensive human-type communications (HTC) on different scales of transmission duration is a challenging task. In addition, the finite blocklength coding of the small-size packets of cMTC makes the process more challenging. In this paper, we address the scheduling problem of cMTC coexistent with HTC in LTE. In this regard, we formulate the processes as optimization problems that maximize the system utility while providing guarantees for the different quality-of-service (QoS) of both types of traffic. Moreover, we propose computationally-efficient algorithms that utilize the matching theory and analyze them from a practical perspective to prove that they can be used as practical schemes. The simulation results show a close-to-optimal performance for the proposed scheme and its superiority to conventional algorithms.