Topology Design for Cellular IoT: From ILP to ML Perspective

Due to the emerging deployment of cellular IoT, a network topology design appears to be one of the greatest challenges faced by mobile network operators, that is, both the capacity maximization and the overall network cost minimization have been considered as the objective of network planning. In this article, the topology design for cellular IoT is divided into two subproblems: gateway location and gateway connection problems. They are formulated as the integer linear programming problem. For the former subproblem, the best gateway locations and the optimal network cost can be obtained by the optimization approach to form multiple local networks. For the latter subproblem, a connection of selected gateways with the minimum connection cost can be presented by the Kruskal algorithm to form a backbone-like network. This results in a two-layered network with the minimum network cost. According to the results, a significant reduction in the network cost could be obtained with the optimal setting of system parameters. In addition to the optimization approach, the gateway location problem is examined by means of clustering algorithms. The fair gateway placement can be obtained by K-medoids clustering without the time complexity.