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With the emerging unlicensed spectrum sharing and Machine-to-Machine communications, the coexistence performance of multiple devices with different access schemes operating at the same unlicensed bands has received significant research interests. As the two most representative random-access schemes, Aloha and Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) both found wide applications in unlicensed bands. Yet most of the studies have focused on the coexistence of CSMA-based networks, leaving the coexistence of Aloha-based and CSMA-based networks largely unexplored. The challenge originates from the lack of a coexistence model of slotted Aloha and CSMA. In this paper, the throughput performance of coexisting Aloha and CSMA networks is characterized and optimized by extending a unified analytical framework proposed for random-access networks. The analysis shows that different from the single-network case where the maximum throughput of CSMA is much higher thanks to carrier sensing, when Aloha and CSMA coexist, Aloha would significantly outperform CSMA if each network optimizes its own throughput performance without cooperation, leading to poor throughput performance for CSMA and severe unfairness. To achieve fair coexistence, inter-network cooperation is crucial. The optimal transmission probabilities of Aloha and CSMA for maximizing the total network throughput under a given throughput ratio are further derived, and applied to coexisting LTE Unlicensed and WiFi networks to optimize their coexistence performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) for the Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to support a large number of devices/users for short packet transmissions with low complexity and low energy consumption. By utilizing the simple while efficient noncoherent energy-based transmission scheme, this work aims to jointly detect the user activity and the desired data for mMTC. First, by exploiting the sparse characteristics of the user activity, approximation message passing (AMP) algorithm is proposed to eliminate the multi-user interference, and a denoiser is designed to minimize the mean-squared error (MSE) of the transmitted signals. Then, maximum ${a}$ posteriori (MAP) criterion is adopted to approximately detect the user activity and the desired data. By minimizing the symbol error probability of the above two-step algorithm, the power constellation for each user is designed, and it is shown to be asymptotically optimal as the number of the receiver antennas goes to infinity. Finally, simulation results reveal that the proposed noncoherent scheme outperforms the coherent one in the low SNR regime and for short packet transmissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a key technology to enable massive machine type communications (mMTC) in 5G networks and beyond. In this paper, NOMA is applied to improve the random access efficiency in high-density spatially-distributed multi-cell wireless IoT networks, where IoT devices contend for accessing the shared wireless channel using an adaptive $p$ -persistent slotted Aloha protocol. To enable a capacity-optimal network, a novel formulation of random channel access management is proposed, in which the transmission probability of each IoT device is tuned to maximize the geometric mean of users’ expected capacity. It is shown that the network optimization objective is high dimensional and mathematically intractable, yet it admits favourable mathematical properties that enable the design of efficient data-driven algorithmic solutions which do not require a priori knowledge of the channel model or network topology. A centralized model-based algorithm and a scalable distributed model-free algorithm, are proposed to optimally tune the transmission probabilities of IoT devices and attain the maximum capacity. The convergence of the proposed algorithms to the optimal solution is further established based on convex optimization and game-theoretic analysis. Extensive simulations demonstrate the merits of the novel formulation and the efficacy of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a multichannel random access system in which each user accesses a single channel at each time slot to communicate with an access point (AP). Users arrive to the system at random and be activated for a certain period of time slots and then disappear from the system. Under such dynamic network environment, we propose a distributed multichannel access protocol based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) to improve both throughput and fairness between active users. Unlike the previous approaches adjusting channel access probabilities at each time slot, the proposed RL algorithm deterministically selects a set of channel access policies for several consecutive time slots. To effectively reduce the complexity of the proposed RL algorithm, we adopt a branching dueling Q-network architecture and propose an efficient training methodology for producing proper Q-values over time-varying user sets. We perform extensive simulations on realistic traffic environments and demonstrate that the proposed online learning improves both throughput and fairness compared to the conventional RL approaches and centralized scheduling policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Random access (RA) or preamble collision is one of the crucial problems in massive internet-of-things (IoT) at the network entry stage. Since a massive number of IoT nodes simultaneously attempt RAs on the same physical random access channel (PRACH), preambles may be selected by multiple nodes, incurring preamble collisions at the first step of the RA procedure. However, conventional RA models are limited to binary preamble detections which poses severe RA performance loss in the massive IoT environment. In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL)-based end-to-end RA framework which has detection and resolution abilities for the collided preambles. In particular, advanced preamble classification and timing advance (TA) classifications are performed using deep neural networks (DNNs) for improving the probability of RA success while reducing the delay of the entire RA procedure. The effectiveness of the proposed DNN-based preamble and TA classifiers are demonstrated through extensive simulations. We further evaluate the system-level performance of the proposed DL-based RA model. It shows a significantly higher probability of instant RA success, which makes every node succeed in RA with very limited reattempts, and also maintains a significantly lower RA delay in massive IoT environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical random access protocols support prioritized user groups by allowing a high priority user to transmit with a relatively high probability. However, when a high priority user competes for the channel with a large number of low priority users, transmission success probability of the high priority user can still diminish to zero. In this paper, a distributed medium access control (MAC) framework is proposed to support hierarchical user groups in a random multiple access system in the following senses. First, when the number of primary users is small, the MAC framework guarantees that channel availability should stay above a pre-determined threshold no matter how many secondary users are competing for the channel. Second, when the number of primary users is large, the MAC framework drives transmission probabilities of the secondary users to zero but does not reject channel access to the primary users. These properties are achieved in a distributed environment without direct message exchange between users, without knowledge on the number of users, and without knowing whether each transmission should belong to a primary or a secondary user. The MAC framework is also extended to systems where each user can be equipped with multiple transmission options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being able to accommodate multiple simultaneous transmissions on a single channel, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) appears as an attractive solution to support massive machine type communication (mMTC) that faces a massive number of devices competing to access the limited number of shared radio resources. In this paper, we first analytically study the throughput performance of NOMA-based random access (RA), namely NOMA-RA. We show that while increasing the number of power levels in NOMA-RA leads to a further gain in maximum throughput, the growth of throughput gain is slower than linear. This is due to the higher-power dominance characteristic in power-domain NOMA known in the literature. We explicitly quantify the throughput gain for the very first time in this paper. With our analytical model, we verify the performance advantage of NOMA-RA scheme by comparing with the baseline multi-channel slotted ALOHA (MS-ALOHA), with and without capture effect. Despite the higher-power dominance effect, the maximum throughput of NOMA-RA with four power levels achieves over three times that of the MS-ALOHA. However, our analytical results also reveal the sensitivity of load on the throughput of NOMA-RA. To cope with the potential bursty traffic in mMTC scenarios, we propose adaptive load regulation through a practical user barring algorithm. By estimating the current load based on the observable channel feedback, the algorithm adaptively controls user access to maintain the optimal loading of channels to achieve maximum throughput. When the proposed user barring algorithm is applied, simulations demonstrate that the instantaneous throughput of NOMA-RA always remains close to the maximum throughput confirming the effectiveness of our load regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In distributed random access (RA), each device should consider its own information as well as the influence from others, which is difficult to obtain with diverse capabilities of devices. In this paper, we study the RA problem for massive devices with heterogeneous device capabilities in large-scale energy harvesting IoT networks. To deal with the overload issue for massive devices with different capabilities, we propose an optimal RA policy by improving the conventional mean field games (MFG) via exchanging the mean field terms (MFT) among devices. Specifically, we formulate the delay optimal problem as a two-dimensional Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem involving both energy and data states. For distributed deployment of massive RA, we divide the MDP into multiple per-device subproblems, and propose the distributed RA scheme by solving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation using stochastic learning. Considering the deviation of MFT estimation induced by heterogeneous device capabilities, we design an MFT consensus scheme based on stochastic approximation by information exchange among neighbor devices. For reducing the state space and exchanging the MFT efficiently, we adopt the number of simultaneous access devices instead of the conventional MFT. Furthermore, we prove the convergence of the proposed scheme with coupling MFT and Q-factor. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RA scheme outperforms baseline schemes on delay performance, especially in the heavy traffic load regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider an asynchronous random access scheme called irregular repetition ALOHA (IRA) as a generalization of contention resolution ALOHA (CRA) with varying repetitions. We present an asymptotic performance analysis of CRA and IRA on the collision channel for regular and irregular repetition rates. We also propose an improvement by merging the clean parts of packet replicas in partial collisions, and extend our analysis to this scenario as well. Specific designs of repetition distributions based on the new analysis show that the optimized solutions of irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA) perform well in both IRA and the enhanced scheme, and they considerably outperform the regular repetition distributions. We also introduce energy harvesting (EH) to both schemes as a practical and sustainable adaptation, where users are able to harvest energy and store it in their finite-capacity batteries. We model the battery state by a discrete-time Markov chain and derive an optimal transmission policy to maximize the asymptotic performance of the system. We provide comprehensive numerical results for both practical and asymptotic scenarios to verify the validity of the proposed analyses, and illustrate the benefits of the proposed systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In machine-type communication (MTC), random access has been employed for a number of devices and sensors to access uplink channels using a pool of preambles. To support different priorities due to various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, random access can be generalized with multiple pools, which may result in low spectral efficiency. In this paper, for high spectral efficiency, random access with layered preambles (RALP) is proposed to support devices with two different priorities based on the notion of power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). In RALP, two groups of devices, namely type-1 and type-2 devices, are supported with different priorities, where type-1 devices have higher priority than type-2 devices. Closed-form expressions are derived for the detection performance of preambles transmitted by type-1 devices, which can be used for a certain performance guarantee of type-1 devices of high priority. Low-complexity preamble detection methods are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NarrowBand-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new 3GPP radio access technology designed to provide better coverage for Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks. To provide reliable connections with extended coverage, a repetition transmission scheme and up to three Coverage Enhancement (CE) groups are introduced into NB-IoT during both Random Access CHannel (RACH) procedure and data transmission procedure, where each CE group is configured with different repetition values and transmission resources. To characterize the RACH performance of the NB-IoT network with three CE groups, this paper develops a novel traffic-aware spatio-temporal model to analyze the RACH success probability, where both the preamble transmission outage and the collision events of each CE group jointly determine the traffic evolution and the RACH success probability. Based on this analytical model, we derive the analytical expression for the RACH success probability of a randomly chosen IoT device in each CE group over multiple time slots with different RACH schemes, including baseline, back-off (BO), access class barring (ACB), and hybrid ACB and BO schemes (ACB&BO). Our results have shown that the RACH success probabilities of the devices in three CE groups outperform that of a single CE group network but not for all the groups, which is affected by the choice of the categorizing parameters.This mathematical model and analytical framework can be applied to evaluate the performance of multiple group users of other networks with spatial separations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies showed that the packet collision probability in the 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) can approach zero by adopting Centralized Random Backoff (CRB), which improves the total throughput performance. Moreover, it was reported that wireless networks using CRB maintain a high level of compatibility to legacy wireless local area networks (WLANs) when they coexist. However, little attention has been paid to relations between the performance of CRB and the retransmission limit, although the number of retransmission limit is an essential parameter that must be carefully chosen when implementing CRB for efficient WLANs. This article presents more realistic Markov chain models, and studies the impact of retransmission limit on the performance of CRB. These relations are also investigated by Monte Carlo simulation in more practical scenarios. Results show the trade-off that the total throughput increases with the retransmission limit when the number of nodes is larger than 15; whereas, the channel access opportunities in the mixed network scenario are more unevenly distributed between nodes as the retransmission limit increases. It is also shown in the simulation results that the throughput degradation caused by the hidden node problem is alleviated as the retransmission limit increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the massive random access Gaussian channel with a focus on small payloads. For this problem, grant-based schemes have been regarded as inefficient due to the necessity of large feedbacks and the use of inefficient scheduling request methods. This articles attempts to answer whether grant-based schemes can be competitive against state-ot-art grantless schemes and worthy of further investigation. In order to compare these schemes fairly, a novel model is proposed, and, under this model, a novel grant-based scheme is proposed. The scheme uses Ordentlich and Polyanskiy’s grantless method to transmit small coordination indices in order to perform the scheduling request, which allows both the request from the users to be efficient and the feedback to be small. We also present improvements to the Ordentlich and Polyanskiy’s scheme, allowing it to transmit information through the choice of sub-block, as well as to handle collisions of the same message, significantly improving the method for very small messages. Simulation results show that, if a small feedback is allowed, the proposed scheme performs closely to the state-of-art while using simpler coding schemes, suggesting that novel grant-based schemes should not be dismissed as a potential solution to the massive random access problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-slot pilot allocation (MSPA) random access scheme with unequal access latency (UAL) protection for user equipments (UEs) in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). In order to provide UAL protection, we allocate the UEs into different groups according to their UAL requirements, where the higher priority groups can access in a stringent latency under the required access failure probability (AFP) requirement; while the lower priority groups are able to access with predetermined AFP by allocated multi-slot. Specifically, our generalized UAL-MSPA random access protocol is incorporated into two considered UAL protection schemes, i.e., the independent UAL scheme and the expanded UAL scheme. We derive the closed-form expressions to the AFP and the sum throughout for the investigated UAL schemes. By utilizing these analytical results, a joint parameter optimization problem is formulated for obtaining the minimum access latency under the desired AFP requirements. Detailed simulations validate our analytical results and confirm the efficiency of our proposed UAL schemes. Finally, the UAL-MSPA random access protocol with joint optimized parameters outperforms the existing protocols in terms of achieving high sum throughput and shortening the access latency of low priority group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the performance evaluation of TCP New Reno over satellite DVB-RCS2 links with random access is analyzed. Based on the satellite system consisting of a large number of source-destination TCP New Reno pairs, a Markov chain model for a TCP connection is conducted. According to the principles of TCP New Reno, two one-step transition probabilities for the value of congestion window in different data transmission phases (e.g. the slow start phase and congestion avoidance phase) are proposed. In order to analysis the throughput of a TCP connection, according to the packets lost events, three conditions (no packet lost, packets lost in the congestion avoidance phase, and packets lost in the slow start phase), are theoretically analyzed. We analytically derive the upper and lower throughput bounds, simulations and analysis are integrated together to indicate the effective ness and correctness of theoretical analysis. Moreover, we can clearly determine which factor plays role for the performance of TCP New Reno. The analysis not only includes the main algorithms of TCP protocol, but also is developed for general random access. Therefore, the Markov model and the theoretical analysis can be applied to many erasure channel, and the conclusions are extremely critical for the research of improving TCP performance over links with random access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a sequel of our previous work on access throughput optimization of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. By incorporating a finite data transmission rate, this paper aims to characterize the effect of data transmission on the optimal access performance of Machine-Type Devices (MTDs). Specifically, both the maximum access throughput and the corresponding optimal Access Class Barring (ACB) factor are obtained as explicit functions of the data transmission rate, which show that even with the ACB factor optimally tuned, the access throughput may deteriorate as the number of MTDs increases, and even drop to zero if the data transmission rate is too small. To boost the data transmission rate, more resources should be allocated to data transmission, which, however, leads to fewer chances for access. In light of the tradeoff between the data transmission rate and the access frequency, the time slot length is further optimized for maximizing the normalized maximum access throughput. Simulation results corroborate that by properly choosing the time slot length, substantial gains can be achieved over the default setting in various scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grant-free random access (RA) with massive MIMO is a promising RA technique that provides significant benefits in increasing the channel reuse efficiency with low signaling overhead. Since user equipment (UE) detection and channel estimation in grant-free RA rely solely on the received preambles, preamble designs that enable high success rate of UE detection and channel estimation are very much in need to ensure the performance gain of grant-free RA with massive MIMO. In this paper, a super preamble consisting of multiple consecutive preambles is proposed for the high success rate of grant-free RA with massive MIMO. With the proposed approach, the success of UE detection and channel estimation for a UE depends on two conditions: 1) it is a solvable UE, where we define the UE whose super preamble is not a linear combination of the other UEs’ super preambles as a solvable UE and 2) its super preamble is detected. Accordingly, we theoretically analyze the solvable rate of the UEs with multiple preambles and propose a reliable UE detection algorithm to obtain the super preambles of the UEs by exploiting the quasi-orthogonality characteristic of massive MIMO. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that turning a preamble into a super preamble consisting of two or three shorter preambles, the success rate of UE detection and channel estimation could be significantly increased using the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA) based uncoordinated random access scheme for energy harvesting (EH) nodes. Specifically, we consider the case in which each user has a battery that is recharged with harvested energy from the environment in a probabilistic manner. We analyze this scheme starting with a unit-sized battery at the nodes and extend the analysis to the case of a finite-sized battery. For both scenarios, we derive the asymptotic throughput expressions and obtain the optimized probability distributions for the number of packet replicas of the users. We demonstrate that for the case of IRSA with EH nodes, these optimized distributions perform considerably better than the alternatives, including slotted ALOHA (SA), contention resolution diversity slotted ALOHA (CRDSA), and IRSA, which do not take into account the EH process for both asymptotic and finite frame length scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different from the conventional packet-based random access schemes where each data packet needs to contend for channel access, with connection-based random access, a connection is first established before data packet transmission. Despite the consensus that there exists a critical threshold of the data packet transmission time, only above which establishing a connection is beneficial, characterization of such a threshold has received little attention. In this paper, a comparative study will be presented on the optimal throughput performance of the packet-based random access and the connection-based random access to characterize criteria for beneficial connection establishment. Based on a unified channel-centric model, explicit expressions of the maximum effective throughput are obtained for both packet-based and connection-based Aloha and Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA). The analysis shows that whether connection establishment is beneficial crucially depends on the sensing capability of nodes. The threshold of data packet transmission time with Aloha is found to be much lower than that with CSMA, indicating that the throughput gain brought by connection establishment is more significant when sensing is absent. The analysis sheds important light on the access design of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simultaneous random access attempts from massive machine-type communications (mMTC) devices may severely congest a shared physical random access channel (PRACH) in mobile networks. This paper presents a novel two-phase random access (TPRA) procedure to deal with the congestion caused by mMTC devices accessing the PRACH. During the first phase, the TPRA splits the mMTC devices into smaller groups according to a preamble selected randomly by the devices. Then, in the second phase, each group of devices is assigned with a dedicated channel to complete the random access procedure. The proposed concept allows a base station to adjust the number of dedicated channels in real-time according to the actual network load. We then present an analytical model to estimate the access success probability and the average access delay of the TPRA. Finally, we propose a simple formula to determine the optimal number of random access resources for the second phase of the proposed TPRA. Simulations are carried out to validate the analytical models and to demonstrate the benefits of the TPRA compared to competitive techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future 5G cellular networks supporting delay-sensitive, low-latency communications could employ random access communication to reduce the overhead compared to scheduled access techniques used in 4G networks. We consider a wireless communication system where multiple devices transmit payloads of a given fixed size in a random access fashion over shared radio resources to a common receiver. We allow retransmissions and assume Chase combining at the receiver. The radio resources are partitioned in the time and frequency dimensions, and we determine the optimal partition granularity to maximize throughput, subject to given constraints on latency and outage. In the regime of high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), we derive explicit expressions for the granularity and throughput, first using a Shannon capacity approximation and then using finite block length analysis. Numerical results show that the throughput scaling results are applicable over a range of SNRs. The proposed analytical framework can provide insights for resource allocation strategies in reliable and delay-sensitive random access systems and in specific 5G use cases for massive, short packet uplink access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cellular-based infrastructure is regarded as one of the potential solutions for massive Internet of Things (mIoT), where the random access (RA) procedure is used for requesting channel resources in the uplink data transmission. Due to the nature of the mIoT network with the sporadic uplink transmissions of a large amount of IoT devices, massive concurrent channel resource requests lead to a high probability of RA failure. To relieve the congestion during the RA in mIoT networks, we model RA procedure and analyze as well as evaluate the performance improvement due to different RA schemes, including power ramping (PR), back-off (BO), access class barring (ACB), hybrid ACB and back-off schemes, and hybrid power ramping and back-off (PR&BO). To do so, we develop a traffic-aware spatio-temporal model for the contention-based RA analysis in the mIoT network, where the signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) outage and collision events jointly determine the traffic evolution and the RA success probability. Compared to existing literature that only models collision from the single-cell perspective, we model both SINR outage and the collision from the network perspective. Based on this analytical model, we derive the analytical expression for the RA success probabilities to show the effectiveness of different RA schemes. We also derive the average queue lengths and the average waiting delays of each RA scheme to evaluate the packets accumulation status and packets serving efficiency. Our results show that our proposed PR&BO scheme outperforms other schemes in heavy traffic scenarios in terms of the RA success probability, the average queue length, and the average waiting delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifth-generation mobile communication systems aim to support massive access for future wireless applications. Unfortunately, wireless resource scarcity in random access (RA) is a fundamental bottleneck for enabling massive access. To address this problem, we propose a virtual carrier sensing (VCS)-based RA scheme in massive MIMO systems. The essence of the proposed scheme lies in exploiting wireless spatial resources of uplink channels occupied by assigned user equipments (UEs) to increase channel resources for RA. With the proposed scheme, RA UEs are able to exploit the spatial resources that are approximately orthogonal to those of assigned UEs, thus sharing the uplink channel resource with assigned UEs without causing significant interference to them. Specifically, to ensure RA UEs avoid serious interference with assigned UEs, a base station (BS) sends tailored virtual carriers to RA UEs on behalf of assigned UEs. The RA UEs then conduct VCS to determine whether or not the uplink channel resource is available for RA. The closed-form approximations for probability of channel availability and uplink achievable rate with the proposed scheme are derived. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to significantly increase channel resources of RA for massive access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze a shared access network with a fixed primary node and randomly distributed secondary nodes whose spatial distribution follows a poisson point process. The secondary nodes use a random access protocol allowing them to access the channel with probabilities that depend on the queue size of the primary node. Assuming a system with multipacket reception receivers, having bursty packet arrivals at the primary and saturated traffic at the secondary nodes, our protocol can be tuned to alleviate congestion at the primary. We analyze the throughput of the secondary network and the primary average delay, as well as the impact of the secondary node access probability and transmit power. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the throughput of the secondary network under delay constraints for the primary node; in the case of no congestion control, the optimal access probability can be provided in closed form. Our numerical results illustrate the effect of network operating parameters on the performance of the proposed priority-based shared access protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a two-user and a three-user slotted ALOHA network with multi-packet reception (MPR) capabilities and a queue-aware transmission control. In this setting, the nodes can adapt their transmission probabilities and their transmission parameters based on the status of the other nodes. Each user has external bursty arrivals that are stored in their infinite capacity queues. We focus on the fundamental problem of characterizing the stable throughput region, as well as of investigating the queueing delay. For the two- and the three-user cases, we obtain the exact stability region, whereas in the former case, we also provide the conditions under which the stability region is a convex set. We perform a detailed mathematical analysis to study the queueing delay in the two-user case by formulating two boundary value problems, the solution of which provides the generating function of the joint stationary probability distribution of the queue size at user nodes. Furthermore, for the two-user symmetric case with MPR, we obtain a lower and an upper bound for the average delay without the need of solving a boundary value problem. In addition, we provide a closed form expression for the gap between the lower and the upper bound. The bounds as it is seen in the numerical results appear to be tight. Explicit expressions for the average delay are obtained for the symmetrical model with capture effect. We also provide a closed form expression for the optimal transmission probability that minimizes the average delay in the symmetric capture case. Finally, we evaluate numerically the presented theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Attaining the vision of Smart Cities requires the deployment of an enormous number of sensors for monitoring various conditions of the environment. Backscatter sensors have emerged to be a promising solution due to the uninterruptible energy supply and relative simple hardwares. On the other hand, backscatter sensors with limited signal processing capabilities are unable to support conventional algorithms for multiple access and channel training. Thus, the key challenge in designing backscatter sensor networks is to enable readers to accurately detect sensing values given simple ALOHA random access, primitive transmission schemes, and no knowledge of channel states. We tackle this challenge by proposing the novel framework of backscatter sensing (BackSense) featuring random encoding at sensors and statistical inference at readers. Specifically, assuming the on/off keying for backscatter transmissions, the practical random encoding scheme causes the on/off transmission of a sensor to follow a distribution parameterized by the sensing values. Facilitated by the scheme, statistical inference algorithms are designed to enable a reader to infer sensing values from randomized transmissions by multiple sensors. The specific design procedure involves the construction of Bayesian networks, namely deriving conditional distributions for relating unknown parameters and variables to signals observed by the reader. Then based on the Bayesian networks and the well-known expectation-maximization principle, inference algorithms are derived to recover sensing values. Simulation of the BackSense system demonstrates high accuracy in reader inference despite the mentioned limitations of backscatter sensors, which grows with increasing numbers of received symbols and reader antennas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A key challenge for enabling machine-to-machine (M2M) communications in long-term evolution (LTE) networks is the intolerably low access efficiency in the presence of massive access requests. To address this issue, a new analytical framework is proposed in this paper to optimize the random access performance of the M2M communications in LTE networks. Specifically, a novel double-queue model is established, which can both incorporate the queueing behavior of each machine-type device (MTD) and be scalable in the massive access scenarios. To evaluate the access efficiency, the network throughput is further characterized, and optimized by properly choosing the backoff parameters including the access class barring (ACB) factor and the uniform backoff (UB) window size. The analysis reveals that the maximum network throughput is solely determined by the number of preambles, and can be achieved by either tuning the ACB factor or the UB window size based on statistical information such as the traffic input rate of each MTD. Simulation results corroborate that with the optimal tuning of backoff parameters, the network throughput can remain at the highest level regardless of how many MTDs in the network, and is robust against feedback errors of the traffic input rate and burstiness of data arrivals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the low frequency band has become more and more crowded, millimeter-wave (mmWave) has attracted significant attention. The IEEE has released the 802.11ad standard to satisfy the demand of ultra-high-speed communication. It adopts beamforming technology that can generate directional beams to compensate for high path loss. In the association beamforming training (A-BFT) phase of BF training, a station (STA) randomly selects an A-BFT slot to contend for training opportunity. Due to the limited number of A-BFT slots, the A-BFT phase suffers high probability of collisions in dense user scenarios, resulting in inefficient training performance. Based on the evaluation of the IEEE 802.11ad standard and 802.11ay draft in dense user scenarios of mmWave wireless networks, we propose an enhanced A-BFT beam training and random access mechanism, including the separated A-BFT (SA-BFT) and secondary backoff A-BFT (SBA-BFT). The SA-BFT can provide more A-BFT slots and divide the A-BFT slots into two regions by defining a new E-A-BFT Length field compared with the legacy 802.11ad A-BFT, thereby maintaining compatibility when 802.11ay devices are mixed with 802.11ad devices. It can also greatly reduce the collision probability in dense user scenarios. The SBA-BFT performs secondary backoff with very small overhead of transmission opportunities within one A-BFT slot, which not only further reduces collision probability, but also improves the A-BFT slots utilization. Furthermore, we propose a 3-D Markov model to analyze the performance of the SBA-BFT. The analytical and simulation results show that both the SA-BFT and the SBA-BFT can significantly improve BF training efficiency, which is beneficial to the optimization design of dense user wireless networks based on the IEEE 802.11ay standard and mmWave technology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To resolve intra-cell pilot collision in crowded massive multiple-input multiple-output systems, a new pilot random access protocol, called strongest-user collision resolution combined graph-based pilots access (SUCR-GBPA), is proposed. This protocol allows all failed user equipments (UEs) to randomly select a pilot from the pilots that are not selected by any UE in the initial step. By exploiting the characteristic that the channel responses between UEs and the base station are invariant within the coherence time, a bipartite graph is established where active UEs and selected pilots are considered variable nodes and factor nodes, respectively. Based on this bipartite graph, the successive interference cancellation algorithm is employed to estimate the channel response of each UE. Finally, utilizing the and-or tree principle, we analyze the performance of the proposed SUCR-GBPA protocol, including the maximum number of the tolerable active UEs, the minimum number of the required pilots, uplink throughput, and the mean-square-error performance of the SUCR-GBPA channel estimation. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the SUCR protocol, the proposed SUCR-GBPA protocol significantly improves the uplink throughput and provides accurate estimation on the channel response at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wi-Fi devices operate following the 802.11 distributed coordination function in order to fairly use the channel that the devices share. However, the throughput performance of the Wi-Fi networks is known to be degraded due to packet collisions. So, we propose a novel multiple access protocol, called centralized random backoff (CRB) for collision-free Wi-Fi networks. In CRB, after a successful reception of a data frame from a station, the access point allocates a unique backoff state to the station by means of the ACK frame. We evaluate its performance by comparing to that of a deterministic backoff mechanism. Evaluation results show that CRB significantly improves the throughput performance by reducing collisions, and it allows a larger number of nodes to operate in a collision-free state without dynamic parameter adjustment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The massive amounts of machine-type user equipments (UEs) will be supported in the future fifth generation (5G) networks. However, the potential large random access (RA) delay calls for a new RA scheme and for a detailed assessment of its performance. Motivated by the key idea of non-orthogonal multiple access, the non-orthogonal RA (NORA) scheme based on successive interference cancellation (SIC) is proposed in this paper to alleviate the access congestion problem. Specifically, NORA utilizes the difference of time of arrival to identify multiple UEs with the identical preamble, and enables power domain multiplexing of collided UEs in the following access process, while the base station performs SIC based on the channel conditions obtained through preamble detection. Our analysis shows that the performance of the NORA is superior to the conventional orthogonal RA (ORA) scheme in terms of the preamble collision probability, access success probability, and the throughput of RA. Simulation results verify our analysis and further show that our NORA scheme can improve the number of the supported UEs by more than 30%. Moreover, the number of preamble transmissions and the access delay for successfully accessed UEs are also reduced significantly by using the proposed RA scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has great potential to manage the rapid growth of wireless data traffic. Massive MIMO achieves tremendous spectral efficiency by spatial multiplexing many tens of user equipments (UEs). These gains are only achieved in practice if many more UEs can connect efficiently to the network than today. As the number of UEs increases, while each UE intermittently accesses the network, the random access functionality becomes essential to share the limited number of pilots among the UEs. In this paper, we revisit the random access problem in the Massive MIMO context and develop a reengineered protocol, termed strongest-user collision resolution (SUCRe). An accessing UE asks for a dedicated pilot by sending an uncoordinated random access pilot, with a risk that other UEs send the same pilot. The favorable propagation of massive MIMO channels is utilized to enable distributed collision detection at each UE, thereby determining the strength of the contenders’ signals and deciding to repeat the pilot if the UE judges that its signal at the receiver is the strongest. The SUCRe protocol resolves the vast majority of all pilot collisions in crowded urban scenarios and continues to admit UEs efficiently in overloaded networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]