Spectrum Sharing Approaches for Machine-Type Communications over LTE Heterogeneous Networks A. Orsino, M. Condoluci, and G. Araniti ARTS Lab., DIIES Dep., University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy {antonino.orsino,massimo.condoluci,araniti}@unirc.it Abstract. Machine-type communications (MTC) are expected to be a key enablers in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem by providing ubiquitous connectivity among a new type of small devices (e.g., sen- sors, wearable devices, smartphone) without (or with minimal) the need of human intervention. In such a scenario, the architecture as well as the radio resource management (RRM) of next-to-come 5G systems needs to be enhanced in order to cope with the exponential growth of low- latency and low-energy MTC traffic. To this end, we propose a dynamic RRM policy which (i) exploits an heterogeneous networks (HetNets) de- ployment aiming to handle massive huge load of MTC devices and (ii) adopts a spectrum sharing approach tailored to improve the spectrum utilization in MTC environments. By comparing our proposal with cur- rent policies in literature, simulations conducted through the open-source Network Simulator 3 (NS-3) shown that our proposed use of spectrum sharing technique can efficiently improve the performance of MTC traffic in terms of spectral efficiency, power consumption, and fairness. Key words: M2M, HetNets, LTE, IoT, spectrum sharing 1 Introduction Machine-type communications (MTC) over Long Term Evolution (LTE) and beyond networks represents one on the killer communication paradigms to be exploited by network providers in order to fulfill the requirement of the future fifth generation (5G) wireless networks [1]. In fact, MTC promise to be a value- adds in the exponential growth of the data traffic generated by a new type of devices (e.g., traffic cameras, sensors, wearable devices) in either large- and small- scale environments. MTC open novel scenarios ranging from outdoor to indoor applications, such as smart city solution, for e.g. with intelligent metering, city automation, traffic control, house management, and remote clinical health care (e.g., see Fig. 1)[2]. This allows unprecedented opportunities in different fields (e.g., transport and logistics, smart power grids) belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem [3]. Nevertheless, the huge deployment of MTC devices expected in the next years dictates for a more effective network architecture in order to meet the low-latency and low-energy MTC requirements and to