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

Security Improvements for the S-MIM Asynchronous Return Link

S-MIM is a hybrid terrestrial and satellite system that enables efficient and high-performance communication in the return link. For communication to be possible between a device and the satellite, a preamble has to be established. Some parameters to generate the preamble are broadcasted by the satellite without protection. It is very important to protect the preamble, because if an attacker knows the preamble he could avoid the communication. This project presents a method without the necessity of establishing the preamble in a way that ensures the communication. However, to achieve this security the trade-off is degradation of throughput and a delay in communication

Probabilistic Rateless Multiple Access for Machine-to-Machine Communication

Future machine to machine (M2M) communications need to support a massive number of devices communicating with each other with little or no human intervention. Random access techniques were originally proposed to enable M2M multiple access, but suffer from severe congestion and access delay in an M2M system with a large number of devices. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple access scheme for M2M communications based on the capacity-approaching analog fountain code to efficiently minimize the access delay and satisfy the delay requirement for each device. This is achieved by allowing M2M devices to transmit at the same time on the same channel in an optimal probabilistic manner based on their individual delay requirements. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a near optimal rate performance and at the same time guarantees the delay requirements of the devices. We further propose a simple random access strategy and characterized the required overhead. Simulation results show the proposed approach significantly outperforms the existing random access schemes currently used in long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) standard in terms of the access delay.Comment: Accepted to Publish in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Mapping DSP algorithms to a reconfigurable architecture Adaptive Wireless Networking (AWGN)

This report will discuss the Adaptive Wireless Networking project. The vision of the Adaptive Wireless Networking project will be given. The strategy of the project will be the implementation of multiple communication systems in dynamically reconfigurable heterogeneous hardware. An overview of a wireless LAN communication system, namely HiperLAN/2, and a Bluetooth communication system will be given. Possible implementations of these systems in a dynamically reconfigurable architecture are discussed. Suggestions for future activities in the Adaptive Wireless Networking project are also given

Lightly synchronized Multipacket Reception in Machine-Type Communications Networks

Machine Type Communication (MTC) applications were designed to monitor and control elements of our surroundings and environment. MTC applications have a different set of requirements compared to the traditional communication devices, with Machine to Machine (M2M) data being mostly short, asynchronous, bursty and sometimes requiring end-to-end delays below 1ms. With the growth of MTC, the new generation of mobile communications has to be able to present different types of services with very different requirements, i.e. the same network has to be capable of "supplying" connection to the user that just wants to download a video or use social media, allowing at the same time MTC that has completely different requirements, without deteriorating both experiences. The challenges associated to the implementation of MTC require disruptive changes at the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers, that lead to a better use of the spectrum available. The orthogonality and synchronization requirements of the PHY layer of current Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) radio access network (based on glsofdm and Single Carrier Frequency Domain Equalization (SC-FDE)) are obstacles for this new 5th Generation (5G) architecture. Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) and other modulation techniques were proposed as candidates for the 5G PHY layer, however they also suffer from visible degradation when the transmitter and receiver are not synchronized, leading to a poor performance when collisions occur in an asynchronous MAC layer. This dissertation addresses the requirements of M2M traffic at the MAC layer applying multipacket reception (MPR) techniques to handle the bursty nature of the traffic and synchronization tones and optimized back-off approaches to reduce the delay. It proposes a new MAC protocol and analyses its performance analytically considering an SC-FDE modulation. The models are validated using a system level cross-layer simulator developed in MATLAB, which implements the MAC protocol and applies PHY layer performance models. The results show that the MAC’s latency depends mainly on the number of users and the load of each user, and can be controlled using these two parameters

On the Fundamental Limits of Random Non-orthogonal Multiple Access in Cellular Massive IoT

Machine-to-machine (M2M) constitutes the communication paradigm at the basis of Internet of Things (IoT) vision. M2M solutions allow billions of multi-role devices to communicate with each other or with the underlying data transport infrastructure without, or with minimal, human intervention. Current solutions for wireless transmissions originally designed for human-based applications thus require a substantial shift to cope with the capacity issues in managing a huge amount of M2M devices. In this paper, we consider the multiple access techniques as promising solutions to support a large number of devices in cellular systems with limited radio resources. We focus on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) where, with the aim to increase the channel efficiency, the devices share the same radio resources for their data transmission. This has been shown to provide optimal throughput from an information theoretic point of view.We consider a realistic system model and characterise the system performance in terms of throughput and energy efficiency in a NOMA scenario with a random packet arrival model, where we also derive the stability condition for the system to guarantee the performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for 5G System

Packet CDMA communication without preamble

Code-Division Multiple-Access (CDMA) is one of the leading digital wireless communication methods currently employed throughout the world. Third generation (3G) and future wireless CDMA systems are required to provide services to a large number of users where each user sends data burst only occasionally. The preferred approach is packet based CDMA so that many users share the same physical channel simultaneously. In CDMA, each user is assigned a pseudo-random (PN) code sequence. PN codephase synchronization between received signals and a locally generated replica by the receiver is one of the fundamental requirements for successful implementation of any CDMA technique. The customary approach is to start each CDMA packet with a synchronization preamble which consists of PN code without data modulation. Packets with preambles impose overheads for communications in CDMA systems especially for short packets such as mouse-clicks or ATM packets of a few hundred bits. Thus, it becomes desirable to perform PN codephase synchronization using the information-bearing signal without a preamble. This work uses a segmented matched filter (SMF) which is capable of acquiring PN codephase in the presence of data modulation. Hence the preamble can be eliminated, reducing the system overhead. Filter segmentation is also shown to increase the tolerance to Doppler shift and local carrier frequency offset. Computer simulations in MATLAB® were carried out to determine various performance measures of the acquisition system. Substantial improvement in probability of correct codephase detection in the presence of multiple-access interference and data modulation is obtained by accumulating matched filter samples over several code cycles prior to making the codephase decision. Correct detection probabilities exceeding 99% are indicated from simulations with 25 co-users and 10 kHz carrier frequency offset or Doppler shift by accumulating five or more PN code cycles, using maximum selection detection criterion. Analysis and simulation also shows that cyclic accumulation can improve packet throughput by 50% and by as much as 100% under conditions of high offered traffic and Doppler shift for both fixed capacity and infinite capacity systems

An adaptive ISMA-DS/CDMA MAC protocol for third-generation mobile communications systems

In this paper, an inhibit sense multiple access–direct sequence/code division multiple access (ISMA-DS/CDMA) medium access control protocol for a packet transmission mobile radio network is presented. The main feature of this protocol is its ability to retain the inherent flexibility of random access protocols while at the same time reducing to some extent the randomness in the access in order to increase the system capacity. In this framework, the protocol is presented together with some adaptive mechanisms that improve the protocol performance by means of regulating the access and varying the transmission bit rate according to the channel load that is broadcast by the base station. As a result, an adaptive bit rate algorithm is presented that reaches a throughput value close to the theoretical maximum.Peer Reviewe