Cooperative Scheduler to Enhance Massive Connectivity in 5G and Beyond by Minimizing Interference in OMA and NOMA

The fifth-generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks introduced massive machine-type communications (mMTC) to cope with the growing demand of massive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the heterogeneous characteristics of massive IoT and diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements may lead to severe interference that could degrade the expected QoS of the cellular ecosystem. Therefore, this article studies the impact of interference caused by mMTC connections. We theoretically model the intercell interference (ICI) minimization problem for the existing orthogonal multiple access (OMA) technique and propose its corresponding solution. Furthermore, we jointly solve the ICI and the cochannel interference minimization problem for the IoT users when the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique is used. For the proposed OMA and NOMA schemes, we design a cooperative scheduler to reduce the impact of such interference. The results show that our proposed schemes provide up to 58%, 75%, and 100% more improvements in terms of user’s data rates, energy consumption, and connection density, respectively.