Energy efficiency, latency and reliability trade‐offs in M2M uplink scheduling

Abstract

Issues of energy efficiency, latency and reliability have engaged researchers' attention in wireless communications for a long time due to their importance in the dependable delivery of data over wireless networks. The emergence of M2M communication and IoT has intensified this attention because energy efficiency and latency are critical factors affecting their performance. In this paper, a scheduler is designed by utilising the probability density function of the signal-to-noise ratio of Rayleigh fading channels to define a threshold used for resource allocation. This threshold, combined with the mean SNR of an M2M device, determines whether or not an M2M device is eligible for scheduling, given its instantaneous channel conditions. The trade-off between energy efficiency, latency and packet drop of this proposed scheduling strategy is investigated. The performance of the proposed scheduler is compared to round robin, maximum throughput, and proportional fair schedulers. Compared to these standard scheduling strategies, the scheduler provides the advantage of trading off latency for energy efficiency by tuning the threshold parameter. INTRODUCTIONMachine-to-Machine (M2M) communication has recently developed into an important technology generating significant revenues to mobile network operators. In this technology, nodes are equipped with sensor modules to monitor and collect various forms of data such as temperature, humidity, and pressure for onward transmission through communication networks.There are many applications of M2M communication, some of which are: smart metering, intelligent transportation, health care, smart city, public safety and consumer devices [1][2][3][4]. M2M communication, however, comes with peculiar challenges which are dependent on its typical characteristics, including a massive number of devices, small size data transmission, infrequent traffic patterns, and battery limitation in contrast to human-to-human (H2H) communications. These problems are well-known and are variously discussed [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Energy efficiency and low latency are very critical considerations in current and future wireless networks. Since the types of wireless services become increasingly diverse as technologies evolve, networks must also be built to meet the corresponding applications and different delay requirements, knowing when and how to tradeThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.