User Association for Load-Balance in Heterogeneous M2M Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an energy efficient user association scheme for uplink heterogeneous networks with machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-human (H2H) coexistence. A group based random access protocol is designed for massive number of machine-type-communications (MTC) user equipment’s (UEs) transmissions. A user association problem is formulated considering the load balance among multiple BSs. A distributed iterative algorithm is developed to solve the optimization problem. In addition, the convergence of the proposed algorithm is proved. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of energy efficiency and load balance.