Efficient Resource Allocation for IoT Cellular Networks in the Presence of Inter-Band Interference

An Internet-of-Things (IoT) cellular network is considered in which IoT devices communicate with an IoT base station using IoT sub-bands placed between long-term evolution (LTE) bands. Due to spectral leakage, inter-band interference exists among IoT sub-bands and also between LTE and IoT bands. It is assumed that the IoT cellular network is responsible for reducing its interference to the LTE network to a certain threshold level. Under such interference regulation to LTE bands, we establish a joint sub-band assignment and power allocation optimization in order to maximize the sum rate of the IoT cellular network. A novel two-stage suboptimal algorithm that sequentially performs sub-band assignment and power control is proposed, reflecting the impact of spectral leakage in its optimization procedure. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm considering the impact of spectral leakage outperforms the conventional optimization algorithms without considering spectral leakage. It is further shown that it provides almost the same sum rate achievable for a stand-alone network as if there were no LTE networks.