Cross‐layer resource allocation for critical MTC coexistent with human‐type communications in LTE: a two‐sided matching approach

Cellular systems present one of the most suitable wireless technologies to efficiently serve critical machine‐type communications (MTC) that require strict quality‐of‐service (QoS) guarantees. Therefore, ultra‐reliable and low‐latency communications is a target use case in the design of the upcoming generations of cellular networks. From the radio resource management perspective, guaranteeing such stringent QoS requirements in long term evolution (LTE) networks is a challenging task, especially in the case of the coexistence of MTC with the human‐type communications (HTC). In this study, the authors address the resource allocation and scheduling problem of critical MTC that coexist with HTC in LTE. The optimisation problem is formulated such that the overall system utility is maximised while fulfilling the different QoS demands of the two sets of users. Utilising the effective bandwidth and effective capacity theories, a cross‐layer design is developed to guarantee the QoS requirements of the critical MTC. For a computationally‐efficient solution of the problem, they formulate it as a two‐sided matching process that can be used as a practical scheduling scheme. To this end, they analyse the convergence, stability, and computational complexity of the proposed methods. Results reveal the close‐to‐optimal performance of the matching‐based scheduling scheme and its superiority to other existing techniques.