Joint Energy and QoS-Aware Memetic-Based Scheduling for M2M Communications in LTE-M

As a result of the increasing number of machine-type devices connected through the Internet, several challenges remain to date to support machine-to-machine (M2M) communications over long term evolution (LTE) cellular networks. In this paper, we tackle one important challenge of scheduling M2M traffic in uplink over LTE-M mobile networks. We propose a novel cross-layer scheme that considers packet scheduling in time and frequency domain using a memetic-based algorithm and aims to optimize resource allocation of M2M devices by considering their quality of service (QoS) needs while minimizing at the same time their energy consumption. After integrating an energy module for LTE in NS3 simulator, we perform simulations in a realistic M2M scenario and we evaluate the results which show how our proposed scheduling scheme outperforms other existing scheduling methods from the literature such as round robin and proportional-fair algorithms in terms of throughput, energy consumption and the percentage of satisfied devices with regard to their delay and throughput requirements.