The satellite component is recognized as a promising solution to complement and extend the coverage of future Internet of things (IoT) terrestrial networks (TNs). In this context, a study item to integrate satellites into narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) systems has been approved within the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization body. However, as NB-IoT systems were initially conceived for TNs, their basic design principles and operation might require some key modifications when incorporating the satellite component. These changes in NB-IoT systems, therefore, need to be carefully implemented in order to guarantee a seamless integration of both TN and non-terrestrial network (NTN) for a global coverage. This paper addresses this adaptation for the random access (RA) step in NB-IoT systems, which is in fact the most challenging aspect in the NTN context, for it deals with multi-user time-frequency synchronization and timing advance for data scheduling. In particular, we propose an RA technique which is robust to typical satellite channel impairments, including long delays, significant Doppler effects, and wide beams, without requiring any modification to the current NBIoT RA waveform. Performance evaluations demonstrate the proposal's capability of addressing different NTN configurations recently defined by 3GPP for the 5G new radio system.
In this paper, we consider an overlay satellite-terrestrial network (OSTN) where an opportunistically selected terrestrial internet-of-things (IoT) network assists the primary satellite communications as well as accesses the spectrum for its own communications under hybrid interference received from extra-terrestrial sources (ETSs) and terrestrial sources (TSs). Herein, the IoT network adopts power-domain multiplexing to amplify-and-forward the superposed satellite and IoT signals. Considering a unified analytical framework for shadowed-Rician fading with integer/non-integer Nakagami-\emph{m} …
This article investigates a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enhanced Internet of Things (IoT) network. In order to provide connectivity, a novel cluster strategy is proposed, where multiple devices can be served simultaneously. Two potential scenarios are investigated: 1) NOMA enhanced terrestrial IoT networks and 2) NOMA enhanced aerial IoT networks. We utilize stochastic geometry tools to model the spatial randomness of both terrestrial and aerial devices. New channel statistics are derived for both terrestrial and aerial devices. The exact and the asymptotic expressions in terms of co…
The Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a cellular access technology developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to provide wide area connectivity for the Internet of Things. Since its introduction in 3GPP Release 13, NB-IoT has in a few years achieved a remarkable market presence and is currently providing coverage in close to 100 countries. To further extend the reach of NB-IoT and to connect the unconnected, 3GPP Release 17 will study the feasibility of adapting NB-IoT to support non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). In this article, we review the fundamentals of NB-IoT an…
In this paper, we consider an overlay satellite-terrestrial network (OSTN) where an opportunistically selected terrestrial IoT network assist primary satellite communications as well as access the spectrum for its own communications in the presence of combined interference from extra-terrestrial and terrestrial sources. Hereby, a power domain multiplexing is adopted by the IoT network by splitting its power appropriately among the satellite and IoT signals. Relying upon an amplify-and-forward (AF)-based opportunistic IoT network selection strategy that minimizes the outage probability (OP) of …
The next wave of wireless technologies is proliferating in connecting things among themselves as well as to humans. In the era of the Internet of things (IoT), billions of sensors, machines, vehicles, drones, and robots will be connected, making the world around us smarter. The IoT will encompass devices that must wirelessly communicate a diverse set of data gathered from the environment for myriad new applications. The ultimate goal is to extract insights from this data and develop solutions that improve quality of life and generate new revenue. Providing large-scale, long-lasting, reliable, …
Due to dense deployments of Internet of things (IoT) networks, interference management becomes a critical challenge. With the proliferation of aerial IoT devices, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), interference characteristics in 3D environments will be different than those in the existing terrestrial IoT networks. In this paper, we consider 3D topology IoT networks with a mixture of aerial and terrestrial links, with low-cost cross-dipole antennas at ground nodes and omni-directional antennas at aerial nodes. Considering a massive-access communication scenario, we first derive the stati…
The Internet of Things (IoT) enables smart cities to achieve the vision of connecting everything by smartly linking gadgets without the need for human interaction. However, due to the rapid proliferation of IoT devices, the amount of data produced accounts for a significant share of all communication services. Hence, 6G-enabled specifications for wireless networks are required to enable both massive and ultra-reliable low-latency access to such a hybrid IoT network. In this article, we propose a smart hybrid random access (SH-RA) scheme for massive connections and ultra-reliable low-latency ac…
Beyond the RF Paradigm: Rydberg Atomic Receivers for Next-Generation IoT
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Shanxi University（山西大学）；Brunel University of London（伦敦布鲁内尔大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Memorial University（纪念大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
This paper analyzes the performance of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites based internet-of-things (IoT) network where each IoT node makes use of multiple satellites to communicate with the ground station (GS). In this work, we consider fixed and variable gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocol at each satellite where the received signal from each IoT node is amplified before transmitting to the terrestrial GS for data processing. To analyze the performance of this novel LEO satellites based direct access architecture, the closed-form expressions for outage probability are derived consid…
Massive MIMO is a promising technology to enable a massive number of Internet of Things nodes to transmit short and sporadic data bursts at low power. In conventional cellular networks, devices use a grant-based random access scheme to initiate communications. This scheme relies on a limited set of orthogonal preambles, which simplify signal processing operations at network access points. However, it is not well suited for Internet of Things (IoT) devices due to: (i) the large protocol overhead, and (ii) the high probability of collision. In contrast to the grant-based scheme, a grant-free app…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming an integral part of our life and also multiple industries. We expect to see the number of IoT connected devices explosively grows and will reach hundreds of billions during the next few years. To support such a massive connectivity, various wireless technologies are investigated. In this survey, we provide a broad view of the existing wireless IoT connectivity technologies and discuss several new emerging technologies and solutions that can be effectively used to enable massive connectivity for IoT. In particular, we categorize the existing wire…
Recently, non-orthogonal codes have been advocated for IoT massive access. Activity detection has been demonstrated to entail common support recovery in a jointly sparse multiple measurement vector (MMV) problem and MMV algorithms have been successfully applied offering various degrees of complexity-performance trade-off. Targeting the small measurement per antenna but large number of antennas setup, independent sensing matrices do offer significant performance advantages. Unfortunately, the IoT random access problem can not readily benefit from this concept as code matrix is fixed over all re…
The explosive growth of bandwidth hungry Internet applications has led to the rapid development of new generation mobile network technologies that are expected to provide broadband access to the Internet in a pervasive manner. For example, 6G networks are capable of providing high-speed network access by exploiting higher frequency spectrum; high-throughout satellite communication services are also adopted to achieve pervasive coverage in remote and isolated areas. In order to enable seamless access, Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks (ISTCN) has emerged as an important re…
The evolvement of wireless communication services concurs with significant growth in data traffic, thereby inflicting stringent requirements on terrestrial networks. This work invigorates a novel connectivity solution that integrates aerial and terrestrial communications with a cloud-enabled high-altitude platform station (HAPS) to promote an equitable connectivity landscape. Consider a cloud-enabled HAPS connected to both terrestrial base-stations and hot-air balloons via a data-sharing fronthauling strategy. The paper then assumes that both the terrestrial base-stations and the hot-air ballo…
In this work, we consider a novel type of Internet of Things (IoT) ultra-narrowband (UNB) network architecture that involves multiple multiplexing bands or channels for uplink transmission. An IoT device can randomly choose any of the multiplexing bands and transmit its packet. Due to hardware constraints, a base station (BS) is able to listen to only one multiplexing band. The hardware constraint is mainly due to the complexity of performing fast Fourier transform (FFT) at a very small sampling interval over the multiplexing bands in order to counter the uncertainty of IoT device frequency an…
Non-terrestrial Networks (NTNs) have become an appealing concept over the last few years and they are foreseen as a cornerstone for the next generations of mobile communication systems. Despite opening up new market opportunities and use cases for the future, the novel impairments caused by the signal propagation over the NTN channel compromises several procedures of the current cellular standards. One of the first and most important procedures impacted is the random access (RA) procedure, which is mainly utilized for achieving uplink synchronization among users in several standards, such as t…
It has been shown that ultra-narrow-band (uNB) massive machine type communication using very compact devices with direct access to satellites is possible at ultra low rate. This enables global ubiquitous coverage for terminals without terrestrial service in the Internet of Remote Things and provides access to any satellite up to the the geostationary earth orbit. The lower data rate for waveforms providing uNB communication is set by the stability and the phase noise of the applied oscillators. In this paper we analyze the physical layer of two candidate waveforms, which are LoRa and Unipolar …
This paper proposes a new medium access control (MAC) protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) applications incorporating pure ALOHA with power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in which the number of transmitters are not known as a priori information and estimated with multi-hypothesis testing. The proposed protocol referred to as ALOHA-NOMA is not only scalable, energy efficient and matched to the low complexity requirements of IoT devices, but it also significantly increases the throughput. Specifically, throughput is increased to 1.27 with ALOHA-NOMA when 5 users can be separated v…
Satellite communications emerged as a promising extension to terrestrial networks in future 6G network research due to their extensive coverage in remote areas and ability to support the increasing traffic rate and heterogeneous networks. Like other wireless communication technologies, satellite signals are transmitted in a shared medium, making them vulnerable to attacks, such as eavesdropping, jamming, and spoofing. A good candidate to overcome these issues is physical layer security (PLS), which utilizes physical layer characteristics to provide security, especially due to its suitability f…
5G NB-IoT is seen as a key technology for providing truly ubiquitous, global 5G coverage (1.000.000 devices/km2) for machine type communications in the internet of things. A non-terrestrial network (NTN) variant of NB-IoT is being standardized in the 3GPP, which along with inexpensive and non-complex chip-sets enables the production of competitively priced IoT devices with truly global coverage. NB-IoT allows for narrowband single carrier transmissions in the uplink, which improves the uplink link-budget by as much as 16.8 dB over the 180 [kHz] downlink. This allows for a long range sufficient…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising multiple access technique for beyond fifth generation (B5G) cellular wireless networks, where several users can be served on a single time-frequency resource block, using the concepts of superposition coding at the transmitter and selfinterference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver. For terrestrial networks, the achievable performance gains of NOMA over traditional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) are well-known. However, the achievable performance of NOMA in aerial networks, compared to terrestrial networks, is not well-understood. In this …
Multiple access is the base for increasing the capacity in multi-user communication networks. However, the growing demand for higher data rates and the number of users who requires communication services has led to the scarcity of orthogonal resources in current wireless communications. On the other hand, integrating the satellite within terrestrial networks as an initiative of 3GPP since its Release 15 entails the need for new forms of multiple access between terrestrial and non-terrestrial users. This paper studies constellation schemes as a new domain to enhance the state-of-the-art multipl…
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）
In this paper, we apply the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) technique to improve the massive channel access of a wireless IoT network where solar-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) relay data from IoT devices to remote servers. Specifically, IoT devices contend for accessing the shared wireless channel using an adaptive $p$-persistent slotted Aloha protocol; and the solar-powered UAVs adopt Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) to decode multiple received data from IoT devices to improve access efficiency. To enable an energy-sustainable capacity-optimal network, we study the j…
The proliferating number of devices with short payloads as well as low power budget has already driven researchers away from classical grant-based access schemes that are notorious for their large signalling overhead as well as power-consuming retransmissions. Instead, light-weight random access protocols have been re-investigated and their throughput has been improved in orders of magnitude with sophisticated yet still low-complex transceiver algorithms. In fact, grant-free access has been identified as a key medium access control technique for providing massive connectivity in machine type c…
Cellular-based networks are expected to offer connectivity for massive Internet of Things (mIoT) systems. However, their Random Access CHannel (RACH) procedure suffers from unreliability, due to the collision from the simultaneous massive access. Despite that this collision problem has been treated in existing RACH schemes, these schemes usually organize IoT devices' transmission and re-transmission along with fixed parameters, thus can hardly adapt to time-varying traffic patterns. Without adaptation, the RACH procedure easily suffers from high access delay, high energy consumption, or even a…
Future wireless networks are envisioned to serve massive Internet of things (mIoT) via some radio access technologies, where the random access channel (RACH) procedure should be exploited for IoT devices to access the networks. However, the theoretical analysis of the RACH procedure for massive IoT devices is challenging. To address this challenge, we first correlate the RACH request of an IoT device with the status of its maintained queue and analyze the evolution of the queue status. Based on the analysis result, we then derive the closed-form expression of the random access (RA) success pro…
This work studies the joint beamforming design problem of achieving max-min rate fairness in a satellite-terrestrial integrated network (STIN) where the satellite provides wide coverage to multibeam multicast satellite users (SUs), and the terrestrial base station (BS) serves multiple cellular users (CUs) in a densely populated area. Both the satellite and BS operate in the same frequency band. Since rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for non-orthogonal transmission and robust interference management in multi-antenna wireless networks, we present…
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…
In various Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, a number of devices and sensors are used to collect data sets. As devices become more capable and smarter, they can not only collect data sets, but also process them locally. However, since most devices would be limited in terms of computing power and energy, they can take advantage of offloading so that their tasks can be carried out at mobile edge computing (MEC) servers. In this paper, we discuss computation offloading for devices in IoT applications. In particular, we consider users or devices with sporadic tasks, where optimizing resource …
In this paper, we investigate the issue of massive access in a beyond fifth-generation (B5G) multi-beam low earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet of things (IoT) network in the presence of channel phase uncertainty due to channel state information (CSI) conveyance from the devices to the satellite via the gateway. Rather than time division multiple access (TDMA) or frequency division multiple access (FDMA) with multi-color pattern, a new non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme is adopted to support massive IoT distributed over a very wide range. Considering the limited energy on the LEO sa…
Energy harvesting (EH) is a promising technique to fulfill the long-term and self-sustainable operations for Internet of things (IoT) systems. In this paper, we study the joint access control and battery prediction problems in a small-cell IoT system including multiple EH user equipments (UEs) and one base station (BS) with limited uplink access channels. Each UE has a rechargeable battery with finite capacity. The system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without complete prior knowledge assumed at the BS, which also deals with large sizes in both state and action spaces. First, …
We investigate the activity detection and channel estimation issues for cell-free Internet of Things (IoT) networks with massive random access. In each time slot, only partial devices are active and communicate with neighboring access points (APs) using non-orthogonal random pilot sequences. Different from the centralized processing in cellular networks, the activity detection and channel estimation in cell-free IoT is more challenging due to the distributed and user-centric architecture. We propose a two-stage approach to detect the random activities of devices and estimate their channel stat…
We provide an overview of the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) work on evolving the 5G wireless technology to support non-terrestrial satellite networks. Adapting 5G to support non-terrestrial networks entails a holistic design spanning across multiple areas from radio access network to services and system aspects to core and terminals. In this article, we describe the main topics of non-terrestrial networks, explain in detail the design aspects, and share various design rationales influencing standardization.
In this paper, the energy efficiency of edge computing platforms for IoT networks connected to a passive optical network (PON) is investigated. We have developed a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization model, which optimizes the placement and number of the cloudlets and VMs and utilizes energy efficient routes with the objective of minimizing the total IoT network and processing power consumption. Our results show that the power consumption can be reduced by consolidating the placement of these VMs at the PON Optical Line Terminal (OLT) in cases where the traffic volume is still…
A fog-radio access network (F-RAN) architecture is studied for an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system in which wireless sensors monitor a number of multi-valued events and transmit in the uplink using grant-free random access to multiple edge nodes (ENs). Each EN is connected to a central processor (CP) via a finite-capacity fronthaul link. In contrast to conventional information-agnostic protocols based on separate source-channel (SSC) coding, where each device uses a separate codebook, this paper considers an information-centric approach based on joint source-channel (JSC) coding via a non-ortho…
We consider a system model comprised of an access point (AP) and K Internet of Things (IoT) nodes that sporadically become active in order to send data to the AP. The AP is assumed to have N time-frequency resource blocks that it can allocate to the IoT nodes that wish to send data, where N < K. The main problem is how to allocate the N time-frequency resource blocks to the IoT nodes in each time slot such that the average packet rate is maximized. For this problem, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-aided random access (RA) scheme, where an intelligent DRL agent at the AP learns t…
Grant-free sparse code multiple access (GF-SCMA) is considered to be a promising multiple access candidate for future wireless networks. In this paper, we focus on characterizing the performance of uplink GF-SCMA schemes in a network with ubiquitous connections, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. To provide a tractable approach to evaluate the performance of GF-SCMA, we first develop a theoretical model taking into account the property of multi-user detection (MUD) in the SCMA system. We then analyze the error rate performance of GF-SCMA in the case of codebook collision to investi…
