An FED-Based Cluster Head Selection and Power Control Scheme for Massive MTC Networks

In cluster based massive machine type communications (MTC) networks, cluster heads (CHs) consume more energy than cluster members (CMs) to forward all data in the cluster. Therefore, inappropriate CHs will certainly aggravate the unevenness of the network energy distribution, intensively shortening the network lifetime. A well designed CH selection and subsequent power control scheme has been demonstrated to be effective in coping with this challenge. Different from the existing schemes in which the network status information of only a single round was considered to select CHs, in this article, all transmission rounds before the first death of MTC devices are taken into account to determine a CH index table. Specifically, considering that the first energy drain (FED) lifetime is a key indicator for the network to capture complete information, an FED-based CH selection scheme is proposed to optimize network lifetime, where the CH index table is obtained to predetermine the index of the CH in every round. Then, a power control scheme is also proposed to further extend the network lifetime with the constraint of transmission time. Finally, extensive simulations verify the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of FED lifetime and successfully delivered packets in the absence and presence of the cochannel interference.