Cluster Formation and Power Control for M2M-Enabled Two-Tier Cellular Network

The vast amount of the machine type communication devices (MTCDs) in machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and their limited energy budget are the crucial challenges to transmission scheme design. Clustered communication has been considered as one key technology for supporting M2M wireless networks with a large number of communication devices. This paper investigates the optimization problem of cluster formation and power control for M2M-enabled two-tier cellular network. To solve the mixed-integer non-linear programming problem, this paper proposes an algorithm that transforms the problem into a coalition structure generation sub-problem embedded with an optimal transmission power sub-problem. Compared with other approaches for solving the cluster formation and power control problem, simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively solve the target problem and decrease the total energy consumption.