29,006 research outputs found
Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity
Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging
5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting
the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for
achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial
multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of
applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has
been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support
high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-of-Things (IoT)
is still a developing topic, as IoT connectivity has requirements and
constraints that are significantly different from the broadband connections. In
this paper we investigate the applicability of massive MIMO to IoT
connectivity. Specifically, we treat the two generic types of IoT connections
envisioned in 5G: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable
low-latency communication (URLLC). This paper fills this important gap by
identifying the opportunities and challenges in exploiting massive MIMO for IoT
connectivity. We provide insights into the trade-offs that emerge when massive
MIMO is applied to mMTC or URLLC and present a number of suitable communication
schemes. The discussion continues to the questions of network slicing of the
wireless resources and the use of massive MIMO to simultaneously support IoT
connections with very heterogeneous requirements. The main conclusion is that
massive MIMO can bring benefits to the scenarios with IoT connectivity, but it
requires tight integration of the physical-layer techniques with the protocol
design.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
PluralisMAC: a generic multi-MAC framework for heterogeneous, multiservice wireless networks, applied to smart containers
Developing energy-efficient MAC protocols for lightweight wireless systems has been a challenging task for decades because of the specific requirements of various applications and the varying environments in which wireless systems are deployed. Many MAC protocols for wireless networks have been proposed, often custom-made for a specific application. It is clear that one MAC does not fit all the requirements. So, how should a MAC layer deal with an application that has several modes (each with different requirements) or with the deployment of another application during the lifetime of the system? Especially in a mobile wireless system, like Smart Monitoring of Containers, we cannot know in advance the application state (empty container versus stuffed container). Dynamic switching between different energy-efficient MAC strategies is needed. Our architecture, called PluralisMAC, contains a generic multi-MAC framework and a generic neighbour monitoring and filtering framework. To validate the real-world feasibility of our architecture, we have implemented it in TinyOS and have done experiments on the TMote Sky nodes in the w-iLab.t testbed. Experimental results show that dynamic switching between MAC strategies is possible with minimal receive chain overhead, while meeting the various application requirements (reliability and low-energy consumption)
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