Resource allocation for massive machine type communications in the finite blocklength regime

Abstract

Massive machine type communications (mMTC) have been regarded as promising applications in the future. One main feature of mMTC is short packet communication. Different from traditional long packet communication, short packet communication suffers from transmission rate degradation and a significant error rate is introduced. In this case, traditional resource allocation scheme for mMTC is no longer applicable. In this paper, we explore resource allocation for cellular-based mMTC in the finite block- length regime. First, to mitigate the load of the base station (BS), we establish a framework for cellular- based mMTC, where MTCGs reuse the resources of cellular users (CUs), aggregate the packets generated by MTCDs, and forward them to the BS. Next, we adopt short packet theory to obtain the minimum required blocklength of a packet that transmits a certain amount of information. Then, by modeling the process of MTCGs-assisted communication as a queuing process, we derive the closed-form expression of the average delay of all MTCDs. Guided by this, we propose a joint power allocation and spectrum sharing scheme to minimize the average delay. Finally, the simulation results verify the correctness of the theoretical results and show that the proposed scheme can reduce the average delay efficiently.