Grant-Free Massive MTC-Enabled Massive MIMO: A Compressive Sensing Approach

A key challenge of massive MTC (mMTC), is the joint detection of device activity and decoding of data. The sparse characteristics of mMTC makes compressed sensing (CS) approaches a promising solution to the device detection problem. However, utilizing CS-based approaches for device detection along with channel estimation, and using the acquired estimates for coherent data transmission is suboptimal, especially when the goal is to convey only a few bits of data. First, we focus on the coherent transmission and demonstrate that it is possible to obtain more accurate channel state information by combining conventional estimators with CS-based techniques. Moreover, we illustrate that even simple power control techniques can enhance the device detection performance in mMTC setups. Second, we devise a new non-coherent transmission scheme for mMTC and specifically for grant-free random access. We design an algorithm that jointly detects device activity along with embedded information bits. The approach leverages elements from the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm, and exploits the structured sparsity introduced by the non-coherent transmission scheme. Our analysis reveals that the proposed approach has superior performance compared to application of the original AMP approach.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

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

Many Access for Small Packets Based on Precoding and Sparsity-aware Recovery

Modern mobile terminals produce massive small data packets. For these short-length packets, it is inefficient to follow the current multiple access schemes to allocate transmission resources due to heavy signaling overhead. We propose a non-orthogonal many-access scheme that is well suited for the future communication systems equipped with many receive antennas. The system is modeled as having a block-sparsity pattern with unknown sparsity level (i.e., unknown number of transmitted messages). Block precoding is employed at each single-antenna transmitter to enable the simultaneous transmissions of many users. The number of simultaneously served active users is allowed to be even more than the number of receive antennas. Sparsity-aware recovery is designed at the receiver for joint user detection and symbol demodulation. To reduce the effects of channel fading on signal recovery, normalized block orthogonal matching pursuit (BOMP) algorithm is introduced, and based on its approximate performance analysis, we develop interference cancellation based BOMP (ICBOMP) algorithm. The ICBOMP performs error correction and detection in each iteration of the normalized BOMP. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in small packet services, as well as the advantages of ICBOMP in improving signal recovery accuracy and reducing computational cost.Comment: 30 pages 8 figures ,submited to tco