Transmit Strategies for Massive Machine-Type Communications based on Mean Field Games

Massive Machine Type Communications are one of the three main type of communication applications in upcoming 5G wireless networks. In this type of communication, the network is required to handle a huge number of devices transmitting information to the same base station receiver in an uncoordinated manner. In this setting, the problem of minimizing energy usage while achieving QoS requirements is a very complex stochastic control problem with a very large number of optimizing agents. In this paper, we propose a Mean Field Games model for this problem that reduces the complexity by a great deal and is thus amenable to numerical solution. Our model is general enough to include generic rate functions, arbitrary energy and QoS requirements per user, different channel fading models, and design knobs for determining the importance of different performance goals. We provide details of the proposed numerical solution and present numerical results that illustrate the characteristics of the obtained control policy.