4,643 research outputs found
Goodbye, ALOHA!
©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday people, objects, and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., carrier sensing multiple access. These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on distributed queueing (DQ), which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern. A description of the DQ mechanism is provided and most relevant existing studies of DQ applied in different scenarios are described in this paper. In addition, we provide a novel performance evaluation of DQ when applied for the IoT. Finally, a description of the very first demo of DQ for its use in the IoT is also included in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Random Pilot and Data Access in Massive MIMO for Machine-type Communications
A massive MIMO system, represented by a base station with hundreds of
antennas, is capable of spatially multiplexing many devices and thus naturally
suited to serve dense crowds of wireless devices in emerging applications, such
as machine-type communications. Crowd scenarios pose new challenges in the
pilot-based acquisition of channel state information and call for pilot access
protocols that match the intermittent pattern of device activity. A joint pilot
assignment and data transmission protocol based on random access is proposed in
this paper for the uplink of a massive MIMO system. The protocol relies on the
averaging across multiple transmission slots of the pilot collision events that
result from the random access process. We derive new uplink sum rate
expressions that take pilot collisions, intermittent device activity, and
interference into account. Simplified bounds are obtained and used to optimize
the device activation probability and pilot length. A performance analysis
indicates how performance scales as a function of the number of antennas and
the transmission slot duration
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
Measurement-Adaptive Cellular Random Access Protocols
This work considers a single-cell random access channel (RACH) in cellular
wireless networks. Communications over RACH take place when users try to
connect to a base station during a handover or when establishing a new
connection. Within the framework of Self-Organizing Networks (SONs), the system
should self- adapt to dynamically changing environments (channel fading,
mobility, etc.) without human intervention. For the performance improvement of
the RACH procedure, we aim here at maximizing throughput or alternatively
minimizing the user dropping rate. In the context of SON, we propose protocols
which exploit information from measurements and user reports in order to
estimate current values of the system unknowns and broadcast global
action-related values to all users. The protocols suggest an optimal pair of
user actions (transmission power and back-off probability) found by minimizing
the drift of a certain function. Numerical results illustrate considerable
benefits of the dropping rate, at a very low or even zero cost in power
expenditure and delay, as well as the fast adaptability of the protocols to
environment changes. Although the proposed protocol is designed to minimize
primarily the amount of discarded users per cell, our framework allows for
other variations (power or delay minimization) as well.Comment: 31 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables. Springer Wireless Networks 201
- …