QoS-aware joint access control and duty cycle control for machine-to-machine communications

Massive devices and various applications imposes new challenges for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications to enable Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we investigate a QoS-aware joint access control and duty cycle control problem for M2M communications to optimise the overall network performance, including energy efficiency, end-to-end delay, reliability, throughput and fairness. We first model a practical hybrid M2M communication network and measure the overall network performance through a cost function. Then, an optimisation problem is formulated to minimise the long-term aggregated network cost. Further more, we overcome the non-convexity of the cost function and mathematically derive the optimal access control. Finally, we propose a distributed access control followed by a reinforcement learning (RL) based duty cycle control which adapts to various network dynamics without priori network information. Simulation results show that, the proposed joint access control and duty cycle control minimise the network long-term aggregated cost, while achieving fairness among cluster heads with QoS differentiation