Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a promising technology for healthcare applications since it reduces the latency necessary in acquiring healthcare data from patients, as well as handling remote patients. Due to the interference, limited bandwidth, and heterogeneity of generated data packets, developing a data transmission framework that offers differentiated Quality of Services (QoS) to the critical and non-critical data packets is challenging. The existing literature studies suffer from insufficient access scheduling considering heterogeneous data packets and relationship among them in healthcare applications. In this paper, we develop an optimal resource allocation framework for NB-IoT that maximizes a user's utility through event prioritization, rate enhancement, and interference mitigation. The proposed Priority Aware Utility Maximization (PAUM) system also ensures weighted fair access to resources. The suggested system outperforms the state-of-the-art works significantly in terms of utility, delay, and fair resource distribution, according to the findings of the performance analysis performed in NS-3.
Keywords: NB-IoT; interference mitigation; prioritized healthcare; resource allocation; utility.