Dynamic bandwidth sharing mechanism for small data communications in machine-type communications

Abstract

MTCs are expected to provide ubiquitous connectivity between machines without the need of human intervention. To support such a large number of autonomous devices, the MTC system architecture needs to be spectrally efficient. NB-IoT has been released by the 3GPP as a promising solution to provide extended coverage and low energy consumption for low cost MTC devices. To leverage NOMA in the context of NB-IoT, in this research project a power domain NOMA scheme is used with user clustering for an NB-IoT system. In particular, the MTC devices are assigned to different ranks within the NOMA clusters where they transmit over the same frequency resources. Through optimizing the resource allocation of MTC devices and NOMA clustering while satisfying the transmission power and quality of service requirements. The optimization problem was formulated to maximize the total throughput of the network. MATLAB Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the developed scheme.