Performance Modeling and Analysis of Heterogeneous Machine Type Communications

With the pervasiveness of wireless devices, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications or machine-type-communications (MTC) is emerging to support data transfer among devices without human interaction. In this paper, we introduce a tractable queueing model for performance modeling and analysis for heterogeneous MTC. We then demonstrate versatile applications of the proposed queueing model. Firstly, we use the queueing model to study the coexistence between M2M communications of MTC devices and human-to-human (H2H) communications in the same networks. We also consider more sophisticated settings, where the MTC user equipments (UEs) are able to perform the transmission to the macro Evolved Node B (eNodeB) or small-cell eNodeB, or perform the relay transmission. In addition, we extend our study to analyze the eNodeB selection and coalition formation for relay transmission when MTC UEs coexist with H2H UEs. In this case, we formulate the non-transferable utility (NTU) coalitional game to model the eNodeB selection and coalition formation for relay transmission. The performance evaluation reveals some interesting results. For example, the throughput of MTC UEs can be improved when the MTC UEs spend more time inactive due to lower contention in the network, compared with the case when the MTC UEs are mostly active.