Game-Theoretic Power Control for Energy Constrained Machine Type Communications

Machine type communications (MTC) unleashes a broad range of applications ranging from mission-critical services to massively connected autonomous nodes. The cellular systems will help in enabling such nodes to play a critical role in future networks. A coexisting cellular scenario for traditional and MTC devices is considered and the need for an energy efficient power control mechanism for MTC nodes is investigated. Reliability is a major requirement for MTC devices (MTCDs) which is the prime utility to be considered along with the power consumed by each user device. For a dense network environment, the MTC power control problem is modeled as a mean field game (MFG) and system utility is modeled in terms of the interference and reliability condition. The proposed MFG is solved using the finite difference method to obtain an optimal power control policy for MTCDs. Simulation results identify the considered scheme a low complexity alternative for a transmit power control mechanism for MTC devices in the coexisting network.