Lifetime-Aware Scheduling and Power Control for M2M Communications in LTE Networks

In this paper the scheduling and transmit power control are investigated to minimize the energy consumption for battery-driven devices deployed in LTE networks. To enable efficient scheduling for a massive number of machine-type subscribers, a novel distributed scheme is proposed to let machine nodes form local clusters and communicate with the base-station through the cluster-heads. Then, uplink scheduling and power control in LTE networks are introduced and lifetime-aware solutions are investigated to be used for the communication between cluster-heads and the base-station. Beside the exact solutions, low-complexity suboptimal solutions are presented in this work which can achieve near optimal performance with much lower computational complexity. The performance evaluation shows that the network lifetime is significantly extended using the proposed protocols.