Proportionally-Fair Sequencing and Scheduling for Machine-Type Communication

We consider uplink machine-type communication (MTC) from energy-constrained devices following the time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol. Conventionally, the energy efficiency performance in TDMA is optimized through multi-user scheduling, i.e., changing the transmission block length allocated to different devices. In such a system, the sequence of devices for transmission, i.e., who transmits first and who transmits second, etc., has not been considered as it does not have any impact on the energy efficiency. In this work, we consider that data compression is performed before transmission and show that the multi-user sequencing is indeed important. We propose to jointly optimize both multi-user sequencing and scheduling along with the compression and transmission rate control. Our results show that multi-user sequence optimization significantly improves the energy efficiency performance of the system, and especially the performance gain is large when the delay bound is stringent. This is advantageous for lower latency MTC.