Multiple Access for Massive Machine Type Communications

The internet we have known thus far has been an internet of people, as it has connected people with one another. However, these connections are forecasted to occupy only a minuscule of future communications. The internet of tomorrow is indeed: the internet of things. The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to improve all aspects of life by connecting everything to everything. An enormous amount of effort is being exerted to turn these visions into a reality. Sensors and actuators will communicate and operate in an automated fashion with no or minimal human intervention. In the current literature, these sensors and actuators are referred to as machines, and the communication amongst these machines is referred to as Machine to Machine (M2M) communication or Machine-Type Communication (MTC). As IoT requires a seamless mode of communication that is available anywhere and anytime, wireless communications will be one of the key enabling technologies for IoT. In existing wireless cellular networks, users with data to transmit first need to request channel access. All access requests are processed by a central unit that in return either grants or denies the access request. Once granted access, users' data transmissions are non-overlapping and interference free. However, as the number of IoT devices is forecasted to be in the order of hundreds of millions, if not billions, in the near future, the access channels of existing cellular networks are predicted to suffer from severe congestion and, thus, incur unpredictable latencies in the system. On the other hand, in random access, users with data to transmit will access the channel in an uncoordinated and probabilistic fashion, thus, requiring little or no signalling overhead. However, this reduction in overhead is at the expense of reliability and efficiency due to the interference caused by contending users. In most existing random access schemes, packets are lost when they experience interference from other packets transmitted over the same resources. Moreover, most existing random access schemes are best-effort schemes with almost no Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. In this thesis, we investigate the performance of different random access schemes in different settings to resolve the problem of the massive access of IoT devices with diverse QoS guarantees. First, we take a step towards re-designing existing random access protocols such that they are more practical and more efficient. For many years, researchers have adopted the collision channel model in random access schemes: a collision is the event of two or more users transmitting over the same time-frequency resources. In the event of a collision, all the involved data is lost, and users need to retransmit their information. However, in practice, data can be recovered even in the presence of interference provided that the power of the signal is sufficiently larger than the power of the noise and the power of the interference. Based on this, we re-define the event of collision as the event of the interference power exceeding a pre-determined threshold. We propose a new analytical framework to compute the probability of packet recovery failure inspired by error control codes on graph. We optimize the random access parameters based on evolution strategies. Our results show a significant improvement in performance in terms of reliability and efficiency. Next, we focus on supporting the heterogeneous IoT applications and accommodating their diverse latency and reliability requirements in a unified access scheme. We propose a multi-stage approach where each group of applications transmits in different stages with different probabilities. We propose a new analytical framework to compute the probability of packet recovery failure for each group in each stage. We also optimize the random access parameters using evolution strategies. Our results show that our proposed scheme can outperform coordinated access schemes of existing cellular networks when the number of users is very large. Finally, we investigate random non-orthogonal multiple access schemes that are known to achieve a higher spectrum efficiency and are known to support higher loads. In our proposed scheme, user detection and channel estimation are carried out via pilot sequences that are transmitted simultaneously with the user's data. Here, a collision event is defined as the event of two or more users selecting the same pilot sequence. All collisions are regarded as interference to the remaining users. We first study the distribution of the interference power and derive its expression. Then, we use this expression to derive simple yet accurate analytical bounds on the throughput and outage probability of the proposed scheme. We consider both joint decoding as well as successive interference cancellation. We show that the proposed scheme is especially useful in the case of short packet transmission

逐次干渉除去を用いた多元接続システムのパワー割り当てに関する研究

In future wireless communication networks, the number of devices is likely to increase dramatically due to potential development of new applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). Consequently, radio access network is required to support multiple access of massive users and achieve high spectral efficiency. From the information theoretic perspective, orthogonal multiple access protocols are suboptimal. To achieve the multiple access capacity, non-orthogonal multiple access protocols and multiuser detection (MUD) are required. For the non-orthogonal code-division multiple access (CDMA), several MUD techniques have been proposed to improve the spectrum efficiency. Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is a promising MUD techniques due to its low complexity and good decoding performance. Random access protocols are designed for the system with bursty traffic to reduce the delay, compared to the channelized multiple access. Since the users contend for the channel instead of being assigned by the base station (BS), collisions happen with a certain probability. If the traffic load becomes relatively high, the throughput of these schemes steeply falls down because of collisions. However, it has been well-recognized that more complex procedures can permit decoding of interfering signals, which is referred to as multi-packet reception (MPR). Also, an SIC decoder might decode more packets by successively subtracting the correctly decoded packets from the collision. Cognitive radio (CR) is an emerging technology to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity by dynamically sharing the spectrum. In the CR networks, the secondary users (SUs) are allowed to dynamically share the frequency bands with primary users (PUs) under primary quality-of-service (QoS) protection such as the constraint of interference temperature at the primary base station (PBS). For the uplink multiple access to the secondary base station (SBS), transmit power allocation for the SUs is critical to control the interference temperature at the PBS. Transmit power allocation has been extensively studied in various multiple access scenarios. The power allocation algorithms can be classified into two types, depending on whether the process is controlled by the base station (BS). For the centralized power allocation (CPA) algorithms, the BS allocates the transmit powers to the users through the downlink channels. For the random access protocols, there are also efforts on decentralized power allocation (DPA) that the users select transmit powers according to given distributions of power and probability, instead of being assigned the transmit power at each time slot by the BS. In this dissertation, the DPA algorithms for the random access protocols with SIC are investigated and new methods are proposed. First a decentralized multilevel power allocation algorithm to improve the MAC throughput performance is proposed, for the general SIC receiver that can decode multiple packets from one collision. Then an improved DPA algorithm to maximize the overall system sum rate is proposed, taking into account of both the MAC layer and PHY layer. Finally, a DPA algorithm for the CR secondary random access is proposed, considering the constraint of interference temperature and the practical assumption of imperfect cancellation. An opportunistic transmission protocol for the fading environment to further reduce the interference temperature is also proposed. For the future work, the optimal DPA for the random access with the SIC receiver is still an open problem. Besides, advanced multiple access schemes that aim to approach the multiple access capacity by combining the advantages of the network coded cooperation, the repetition slotted ALOHA, and the SIC receiver are also interesting.電気通信大学201

Sum Throughput Maximization in Multi-BD Symbiotic Radio NOMA Network Assisted by Active-STAR-RIS

In this paper, we employ active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (ASRIS) to aid in establishing and enhancing communication within a commensal symbiotic radio (CSR) network. Unlike traditional RIS, ASRIS not only ensures coverage in an omni directional manner but also amplifies received signals, consequently elevating overall network performance. in the first phase, base station (BS) with active massive MIMO antennas, send ambient signal to SBDs. In the first phase, the BS transmits ambient signals to the symbiotic backscatter devices (SBDs), and after harvesting the energy and modulating their information onto the signal carrier, the SBDs send Backscatter signals back to the BS. In this scheme, we employ the Backscatter Relay system to facilitate the transmission of information from the SBDs to the symbiotic User Equipments (SUEs) with the assistance of the BS. In the second phase, the BS transmits information signals to the SUEs after eliminating interference using the Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) method. ASRIS is employed to establish communication among SUEs lacking a line of sight (LoS) and to amplify power signals for SUEs with a LoS connection to the BS. It is worth noting that we use NOMA for multiple access in all network. The main goal of this paper is to maximize the sum throughput between all users. To achieve this, we formulate an optimization problem with variables including active beamforming coefficients at the BS and ASRIS, as well as the phase adjustments of ASRIS and scheduling parameters between the first and second phases. To model this optimization problem, we employ three deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods, namely PPO, TD3, and A3C. Finally, the mentioned methods are simulated and compared with each other.Comment: This article will be submitted to the Transactions journa

A Survey on Applications of Cache-Aided NOMA

Contrary to orthogonal multiple-access (OMA), non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) schemes can serve a pool of users without exploiting the scarce frequency or time domain resources. This is useful in meeting the future network requirements (5G and beyond systems), such as, low latency, massive connectivity, users' fairness, and high spectral efficiency. On the other hand, content caching restricts duplicate data transmission by storing popular contents in advance at the network edge which reduces data traffic. In this survey, we focus on cache-aided NOMA-based wireless networks which can reap the benefits of both cache and NOMA; switching to NOMA from OMA enables cache-aided networks to push additional files to content servers in parallel and improve the cache hit probability. Beginning with fundamentals of the cache-aided NOMA technology, we summarize the performance goals of cache-aided NOMA systems, present the associated design challenges, and categorize the recent related literature based on their application verticals. Concomitant standardization activities and open research challenges are highlighted as well

Joint trajectory and precoding optimization for UAV-assisted NOMA networks

The explosive data traffic and connections in 5G networks require the use of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to accommodate more users. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be exploited with NOMA to improve the situation further. In this paper, we propose a UAV-assisted NOMA network, in which the UAV and base station (BS) cooperate with each other to serve ground users simultaneously. The sum rate is maximized by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and the NOMA precoding. To solve the optimization, we decompose it into two steps. First, the sum rate of the UAV-served users is maximized via alternate user scheduling and UAV trajectory, with its interference to the BS-served users below a threshold. Then, the optimal NOMA precoding vectors are obtained using two schemes with different constraints. The first scheme intends to cancel the interference from the BS to the UAV-served user, while the second one restricts the interference to a given threshold. In both schemes, non-convex optimization problems are converted into tractable ones. An iterative algorithm is designed. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for the hybrid NOMA and UAV network

Ant-colony and nature-inspired heuristic models for NOMA systems: a review

The increasing computational complexity in scheduling the large number of users for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system and future cellular networks lead to the need for scheduling models with relatively lower computational complexity such as heuristic models. The main objective of this paper is to conduct a concise study on ant-colony optimization (ACO) methods and potential nature-inspired heuristic models for NOMA implementation in future high-speed networks. The issues, challenges and future work of ACO and other related heuristic models in NOMA are concisely reviewed. The throughput result of the proposed ACO method is observed to be close to the maximum theoretical value and stands 44% higher than that of the existing method. This result demonstrates the effectiveness of ACO implementation for NOMA user scheduling and grouping

UAV-assisted emergency networks in disasters

Reliable and flexible emergency communication is a key challenge for search and rescue in the event of disasters, especially for the case when base stations (BSs) are no longer functioning. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted network is emerging as a promising method to establish emergency networks. In this article, a unified framework of UAV-assisted emergency network is established in disasters. First, the trajectory and scheduling of UAV are jointly optimized to provide wireless service to ground devices with surviving BSs. Then, the transceiver design of UAV and establishment of multi-hop ground device-to- device (D2D) communication are studied to extend the wireless coverage of UAV. In addition, multi-hop UAV relaying is added to realize information exchange between the disaster areas and outside through optimizing the hovering positions of UAVs. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of these three schemes. Finally, open research issues and challenges are discussed