Energy-efficient uplink radio resource management in LTE-advanced relay networks for Internet of Things

For M2M (Machine-to-Machine) machines in cellular networks, employing high transmission rates or transmitting in large power actually cost them much energy. This is harmful to the machines, especially they are operated by batteries. The Relay Node (RN) in Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks is used to enhance the coverage of high data rate and solve the coverage hole problem. Considering the limited energy nature of machines, connecting to the RN instead of the BS is a better choice for cell-edge machines. In this paper, we consider an uplink resource and power allocation problem for energy conservation in LTE-A relay networks. The objective is to minimize the total energy consumption of machines while guarantee their quality of service (QoS). We prove this uplink resource and power allocation problem to be NP-complete and develop an energy-conserved resource and power allocation method to solve the problem. Simulation results show that our algorithm can effectively reduce the energy consumption of machines and guarantee their required service qualities.