Adaptive Resource Scheduling for Dual Connectivity in Heterogeneous IoT Cellular Networks

Abstract

As massive distributed sensor devices are integrated into Internet for Internet of things (IoT) and generate tremendous data from simple measurement to rich multimedia information, wireless cellular networks like LTE are enforced to deploy more small cells to accommodate data from the countless IoT devices. In 3GPP Rel-12 specification, dual connectivity helps deploying the small cell eNBs by separating a control and data plane to a macro and small cell, respectively. The dual connectivity also improves per-user throughput and mobility robustness. Meanwhile, dynamic TDD configuration in the Rel-12 can enhance radio resource utilization of TDD-based small cells even though intercell interference can be worse than legacy static configuration within a small cell cluster. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous cellular IoT network architecture using the aforementioned two small cell features, as well as scheduling algorithms for load balancing in the dual connectivity and for dynamic TDD configuration to mitigate interference in the small cell cluster. We evaluate proposed algorithms using LTE system level simulator and show that our approach improves network throughput.