Clustering-Enabled Prioritized Access Control for Massive Machine-Type Communications in Smart Grid

In this paper, we propose a massive access control scheme in machine-type communications (MTC) aided smart grid, which prioritizes and clusters the devices based on the latency requirement and the distance between devices. The considered use case features a single cell in the massive connectivity smart grid and a large number of devices with different priority types. For the delay-sensitive devices, a dynamic random access channel (RACH) resource allocation scheme is proposed, where a back-off mechanism is used to defer the access requests of delay-tolerance devices. In addition, we propose a cluster-based congestion control algorithm, which clusters the devices to establish local collaboration. Simulation results show the proposed scheme reduces the average blocking probability, while significantly reducing access delay for delay-sensitive devices compared with state-of-the-art access control methods.