Opportunistic Scheduling of Machine Type Communications as Underlay to Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a simple interference exploitation method for machine-type devices sharing uplink resources with cellular users, improving spectrum efficiency without degrading cellular user performance.

Contribution

It introduces a resource allocation technique that leverages interference diversity, allowing MTDs to share resources with minimal impact on cellular users without complex interference management.

Findings

Effective interference diversity exploitation improves resource sharing

Cellular user performance remains unaffected by MTD sharing

High spectrum efficiency achieved with minimal interference

Abstract

In this paper we present a simple method to exploit the diversity of interference in heterogenous wireless communication systems with large number of machine-type-devices (MTD). We consider a system with a machine-type-aggregator (MTA) as underlay to cellular network with a multi antenna base station (BS). Cellular users share uplink radio resources with MTDs. Handling the interference from MTDs on the BS is the focus of this article. Our method takes advantage of received interference diversity on BS at each time on each resource block and allocates the radio resources to the MTD with the minimum interference on the BS. In this method, BS does not need to take the interference from MTD into account in the design of the receive beamformer for uplink cellular user, hence, the degrees of freedom is not used for interference management. Our simulation results show that each resource block can be shared between a cellular user and an MTD, with almost no harmful interference on the cellular user.