Energy-Efficient Activation and Uplink Transmission for Cellular IoT

Consider a large-scale cellular network in which base stations (BSs) serve massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Since IoT devices are powered by a capacity-limited battery, how to prolong their working lifetime is a paramount problem for the success of cellular IoT systems. This article proposes how to use BSs to manage the active and dormant operating modes of the IoT devices via downlink signaling in an energy-efficient fashion and how the IoT devices perform energy-efficient uplink power control to improve their uplink coverage. We first investigate the fundamental statistical properties of an activation signaling process induced by BSs that would like to activate the devices in their cells, which helps to derive the neat expressions of the true, false, and total activation probabilities that reveal joint downlink power control and BS coordination is an effective means to significantly improve the activation performance. We then propose an energy-efficient uplink power control for IoT devices which is shown to save power and ameliorate the uplink coverage probability at the same time. We also propose an energy-efficient downlink power control and BS coordination scheme, which is shown to remarkably improve the activation and uplink coverage performances at the same time.