Energy Efficient Resource Allocation for M2M Devices in LTE/LTE-A

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication consists of the communication between intelligent devices without human intervention. Long term evolution (LTE) and Long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) cellular networks technologies are excellent candidates to support M2M communication as they offer high data rates, low latencies, high capacities and more flexibility. However, M2M communication over LTE/LTE-A networks faces some challenges. One of these challenges is the management of resource radios especially on the uplink. LTE schedulers should be able to meet the needs of M2M devices, such as power management and the support of large number of devices, in addition to handling both human-to-human (H2H) and M2M communications. Motivated by the fundamental requirement of extending the battery lives of M2M devices and managing an LTE network system, including both M2M devices and H2H users, in this paper, two channel-aware scheduling algorithms on the uplink are proposed. Both of them consider the coexistence of H2H and M2M communications and aim to reduce energy consumption in M2M devices. The first algorithm, called FDPS-carrier-by-carrier modified (CBC-M), takes into account channel quality and power consumption while allocating radio resources. Our second algorithm, recursive maximum expansion modified (RME-M), offers a balance between delay requirement and energy consumption. Depending on the system requirements, RME-M considers both channel quality and system deadlines in an adjustable manner according to M2M devices needs. Simulation results show that the proposed schedulers outperform the round-robin scheduler in terms of energy efficiency and have better cell spectral efficiency.