The increasing adoption of Machine-Type Communication (MTC) applications over the Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) network brings new challenges for the traditional resources allocation. Particularly, we focus on the smart metering traffic, which is less time-sensitive and transmitting small data at infrequent periods. In this scenario, many MTC devices transmit access requests to the eNodeB at the same time. This situation causes a serious problem of access congestion. Unfortunately, existing scheduling algorithms are not be able to efficiently handle smart metering traffic at a heavily loaded eNodeB. Specifically, there may not be sufficient resource blocks (RBs) available at an eNodeB for smart metering traffic. In this paper, we utilize a combination of Machine-Type Communications and Device-to-Device (D2D) communications to design our group-based uplink scheduling algorithm. In addition, we also take into account the fairness of inter-group and intra-group. Our simulation results demonstrate the benefits of our proposed scheme compared to conventional approaches on resource allocation.

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