Uplink Resource Allocation in Energy Harvesting Cellular Network with H2H/M2M Coexistence

We consider uplink transmission using a single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) scheme in a cellular network with human-to-human (H2H) and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. The M2M traffic is relayed through energy harvesting (EH) gateways. An optimization framework is developed to minimize the data dropping in the EH gateways caused by delay constraint violation of the M2M traffic while taking into account the rate requirements of the H2H communication, the data and energy causality constraints as well as the SC-FDMA transmission constraints. By introducing two transforms, the original problem is expressed in a linearly separable form in terms of its discrete and continuous variables with the convexified continuous part. Then, Generalized Benders Decomposition is applied to solve the problem by decomposing it into primal and master problems. Due to the NP-hardness of the optimal solution, a low-complexity method is proposed by combining the solution of the primal problem with a heuristic resource block allocation algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic method performs better than two alternative heuristic methods when applied to small scale and large scale networks.