Multiple Access for Small Packets Based on Precoding and Sparsity-Aware Detection

Modern mobile terminals often produce a large number of small data packets. For these packets, it is inefficient to follow the conventional medium access control protocols because of poor utilization of service resources. We propose a novel multiple access scheme that employs block-spreading based precoding at the transmitters and sparsity-aware detection schemes at the base station. The proposed scheme is well suited for the emerging massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, as well as conventional cellular systems with a small number of base-station antennas. The transmitters employ precoding in time domain to enable the simultaneous transmissions of many users, which could be even more than the number of receive antennas at the base station. The system is modeled as a linear system of equations with block-sparse unknowns. We first adopt the block orthogonal matching pursuit (BOMP) algorithm to recover the transmitted signals. We then develop an improved algorithm, named interference cancellation BOMP (ICBOMP), which takes advantage of error correction and detection coding to perform perfect interference cancellation during each iteration of BOMP algorithm. Conditions for guaranteed data recovery are identified. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can accommodate more simultaneous transmissions than conventional schemes in typical small-packet transmission scenarios.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

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