Flexible Radio Resource Allocation for Machine Type Communications in 5G Cellular Networks

The fast growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications in cellular networks brings the challenge of satisfying diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of massive number of machine type communications (MTC) devices with limited radio resources. In this study, we first introduce the minimum bandwidth resource allocation problem for M2M communications in 5G and beyond cellular networks. NP-hardness of the problem is proven. Then, we propose a fast and efficient polynomial-time algorithm exploiting the periodicity of the MTC traffic based on persistent resource allocation. We prove a mathematical performance result for this algorithm considering a special case of the problem. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previously proposed clustering based radio resource algorithm significantly and performs very close to optimal.