Joint Resource Allocation for Enhanced Machine-Type Communication

Enhanced Machine-Type Communication (eMTC) is a bandwidth-reduced low-complexity technology introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Repetition is employed in eMTC to improve network coverage. For different repetition levels, the choice of the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) and the resource block (RB) allocation have to be carefully designed to meet the performance requirements. Furthermore, the existing eMTC systems do not support space division multiplex (SDM) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). To sufficiently exploit the space dimension resources, we consider MIMO for uplink eMTC systems, which allows multiple users to share the same resource block. In this work, we focus on the joint resource allocation for uplink eMTC taking into account MIMO and the repetition feature. We first introduce the uplink eMTC features and extension with MIMO. Next, we optimize the resource allocation in two steps. In the first step, we propose an algorithm to jointly select the optimal repetition level, MCS and the required number of physical resource blocks. In the second step, we propose an efficient physical resource block scheduling algorithm for eMTC with MIMO. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can allocate appropriate resources for users and significantly improve the system performance.