Probabilistic Analysis on QoS Provisioning for Internet of Things in LTE-A Heterogeneous Networks With Partial Spectrum Usage

This paper investigates quality of service (QoS) provisioning for Internet of Things (IoT) in long-term evolution advanced (LTE-A) heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with partial spectrum usage (PSU). In HetNets, the IoT users with ubiquitous mobility support or low-rate services requirement can connect with macrocells (MCells), while femtocells (FCells) with PSU mechanism can be deployed to serve the IoT users requiring high-data-rate transmissions within small coverage. Despite the great potentials of HetNets in supporting various IoT applications, the following challenges exist: 1) how to depict the unplanned random behaviors of the IoT-oriented FCells and cope with the randomness in user QoS provisioning and 2) how to model the interplay of resource allocation (RA) between MCells and FCells under PSU mechanism. In this work, the stochastic geometry (SG) theory is first exploited to statistically analyze how the unplanned random behaviors of the IoT-oriented FCells impact the user performance, considering the user QoS requirements and FCell PSU policy. Particularly, to satisfy the QoS requirements of different IoT user types, the concept of effective bandwidth (EB) is leveraged to provide the users with probabilistic QoS guarantee, and a heuristic algorithm named QA-EB algorithm is proposed to make the EB determination tractable. Then, the interplay of RA between the MCells and FCells is formulated into a two-level Stackelberg game, where the two parties try to maximize their own utilities through optimizing the macro-controlled interference price and the femto-controlled PSU policy. A backward induction method is proposed to achieve the Stackelberg equilibrium. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to corroborate the derived SINR and ergodic throughput performance of different user types and demonstrate the Stackelberg equilibrium under varying user QoS requirements and spectrum aggregation capabilities.