Game-Theoretic Power Control for Energy Constrained Machine Type Communications

What is it about?

Machine type communications (MTC) unleashes a broad range of applications ranging from mission-critical services to massively connected autonomous nodes. The cellular systems will help in enabling such nodes to play a critical role in future networks. A coexisting cellular scenario for traditional and MTC devices is considered and the need for an energy efficient power control mechanism for MTC nodes is investigated. Reliability is a major requirement for MTC devices (MTCDs) which is the prime utility to be considered along with the power consumed by each user device. For a dense network environment, the MTC power control problem is modeled as a mean field game (MFG) and system utility is modeled in terms of the interference and reliability condition. The proposed MFG is solved using the finite difference method to obtain an optimal power control policy for MTCDs. Simulation results identify the considered scheme a low complexity alternative for a transmit power control mechanism for MTC devices in the coexisting network.

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Why is it important?

--> Interference and power consumption modeling for a coexisting HTC and MTC is performed for MTC nodes. --> A mean field game framework for MTC network is formulated successfully with an ability to handle a massive number of nodes. --> Energy and interference aware state dynamics is proposed for the MFG along with the design of the utility function to complement the proposed framework. --> A solution to the proposed MFG framework is proposed using the finite difference method. Lax-Freidrichs technique is utilized to solve the coupled FPK and HJB equations. --> Performance analysis of the proposed power control policy using MFG is done and energy consumption analysis is performed.