Grant-free access is a key enabler for connecting wireless devices with low latency and low signaling overhead in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). For massive grant-free access, user-specific signatures are uniquely assigned to mMTC devices. In this paper, we first derive a sufficient condition for the successful identification of active devices through maximum likelihood (ML) estimation in massive grant-free access. The condition is represented by the coherence of a signature sequence matrix containing the signatures of all devices. Then, we present a design framework of non-orthogonal signature sequences in a deterministic fashion. The design principle relies on unimodular masking sequences with low correlation, which are applied as masking sequences to the columns of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix. For example constructions, we use four polyphase masking sequences represented by characters over finite fields. Leveraging algebraic techniques, we show that the signature sequence matrix of proposed non-orthogonal sequences has theoretically bounded low coherence. Simulation results demonstrate that the deterministic non-orthogonal signatures achieve the excellent performance of joint activity and data detection by ML- and approximate message passing (AMP)-based algorithms for massive grant-free access in mMTC.
Grant-free transmission is an important feature to be supported by future wireless networks since it reduces the signalling overhead caused by conventional grant-based schemes. However, for grant-free transmission, the number of users admitted to the same channel is not caped, which can lead to a failure of multi-user detection. This paper proposes non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) assisted semi-grant-free (SGF) transmission, which is a compromise between grant-free and grant-based schemes. In particular, instead of reserving channels either for grant-based users or grant-free users, we fo…
Grant-free transmission is considered as a promising technology to support sporadic data transmission in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). Due to the distributed manner, high collision probability is an inherent drawback of grant-free access techniques. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is expected to be used in uplink grant-free transmission, multiplying connection opportunities by exploiting power domain resources. However, it is usually applied for coordinated transmissions where the base station performs coordination with full channel state information, which is not suitable …
In massive machine-type communications (mMTC), grant-free access is a key enabler for a massive number of users to be connected to a base station with low signaling overhead and low latency. In this paper, a two-stage genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to design a new set of user-specific, non-orthogonal, unimodular sequences for uplink grant-free access. The first-stage GA is to find a subsampling index set for a partial unitary matrix that can be approximated to an equiangular tight frame. Then in the second-stage GA, we try to find a sequence to be masked to each column of the partial unita…
Due to the limited number of traditional orthogonal pilots, pilot collision will severely degrade the performance of contention-based grant-free transmission. To alleviate the pilot collision and exploit the spatial degree of freedom as much as possible, an extremely sparse orthogonal pilot scheme is proposed for uplink grant-free transmission. The proposed sparse pilot is used to perform active user detection and estimate the spatial channel. Then, inter-user interference suppression is performed by spatially combining the received data symbols using the estimated spatial channel. After that,…
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…
Semi-grant-free (SGF) transmission has recently received significant attention due to its capability to accommodate massive connectivity and reduce access delay by admitting grant-free users to channels which would otherwise be solely occupied by grant-based users. In this paper, a new SGF transmission scheme that exploits the flexibility in choosing the decoding order in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is proposed. Compared to existing SGF schemes, this new scheme can ensure that admitting the grant-free users is completely transparent to the grant-based users, i.e., the grant-based use…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an emerging technology for massive connectivity in machine-type communications (MTC). In code-domain NOMA, non-orthogonal spreading sequences are uniquely assigned to all devices, where active ones attempt a grant-free access to a system. In this paper, we study a set of user-specific, non-orthogonal, binary spreading sequences for uplink grant-free NOMA. Based on Golay complementary sequences, each spreading sequence provides the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of at most 3 dB for multicarrier transmission. Exploiting the theoretical connection to R…
In the upcoming Internet-of-Things (IoT) era, the communication is often featured by massive connection, sporadic transmission, and small-sized data packets, which poses new requirements on the delay expectation and resource allocation efficiency of the Random Access (RA) mechanisms of the IoT communication stack. A grant-free non-orthogonal random access (NORA) system is considered in this paper, which could simultaneously reduce the access delay and support more Machine Type Communication (MTC) devices with limited resources. In order to address the joint user activity detection (UAD) and ch…
Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is promising to achieve low latency massive access in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In grant-free NOMA, pilot signals are often used for user activity detection (UAD) and channel estimation (CE) prior to multiuser detection (MUD) of active users. However, the pilot overhead makes the communications inefficient for IoT devices with sporadic transmissions and short data packets, or when the channel coherence time is short. Hence, it is desirable to improve the efficiency by avoiding the use of pilot signals, which can also further achieve…
In this paper, we propose a cognitive radio-inspired rate-splitting multiple access (CR-RSMA) scheme to assist semi-grant-free (SGF) transmissions in which a grant-based user (GBU) and multiple grant-free users (GFUs) access the base-station (BS) by sharing the same resource block. Using the cognitive radio principle, the GBU and admitted GFU are treated as the primary and secondary users, respectively, and rate-splitting is applied at the admitted GFU to realize SGF transmissions. The admitted GFU's transmit power allocation, target rate allocation, and successive interference cancellation de…
Semi-grant-free (Semi-GF) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enables grant-free (GF) and grant-based (GB) users to share the same resource blocks, thereby balancing the connectivity and stability of communications. This letter analyzes ergodic rates of Semi-GF NOMA systems. First, this paper exploits a Semi-GF protocol, denoted as dynamic protocol, for selecting GF users into the occupied GB channels via the GB user's instantaneous received power. Under this protocol, the closed-form analytical and approximated expressions for ergodic rates are derived. The numerical results illustrate that…
In this paper, a novel blind multi-user detection(MUD) framework for autonomous grant-free high-overloading non-orthogonal multiple access is introduced in detail aimed at fulfilling the requirements of fifth-generation massive Machine Type Communications. From the perspective of the transmitter side, pros and cons regarding diverse types of emerging grant-free transmission, particularly autonomous grant-free, are elaborated and presented in a comparative manner. In the receiver end,code word-level successive interference cancellation (CL-SIC) is revealed as the main framework to perform MUD. …
In this paper, we study the coexistence of critical and non-critical Internet of Things (IoT) services on a grant-free channel consisting of radio access and backhaul segments. On the radio access segment, IoT devices send packets to access points (APs) over an erasure collision channel using the slotted ALOHA protocol. Then, the APs forward correctly received messages to a base station (BS) over a shared wireless backhaul segment, modeled as an erasure collision channel. The APs hence play the role of uncoordinated relays that provide space diversity and may reduce performance losses caused b…
Massive MIMO opens up new avenues for enabling highly efficient random access (RA) by offering abundance of spatial degrees of freedom. In this paper, we investigate the grant-free RA with massive MIMO and derive the analytic expressions of success probability of the grant-free RA for conjugate beamforming and zero-forcing beamforming techniques.With the derived analytic expressions, we further shed light on the impact of system parameters on the success probability. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analyses. It is confirmed that the grant-free RA with massive MIMO is an attractiv…
Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) is a crucial scenario to support booming Internet of Things (IoTs) applications. In mMTC, although a large number of devices are registered to an access point (AP), very few of them are active with uplink short packet transmission at the same time, which requires novel design of protocols and receivers to enable efficient data transmission and accurate multi-user detection (MUD). Aiming at this problem, grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) protocol is proposed. In GF-NOMA, active devices can directly transmit their preambles and data sy…
Massive machine-type communication (MTC) is expected to play a key role in supporting Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as smart cities, smart factory, and connected vehicles through cellular networks. MTC is characterized by a large number of MTC devices and their sparse activities, which are difficult to be supported by conventional approaches and motivate the design of new access technologies. In particular, in the 5th generation (5G), grant-free or 2-step random access schemes are introduced for MTC to be more efficient by reducing signaling overhead. In this article, we first int…
Grant-free multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) usually employs non-orthogonal pilots for joint user detection and channel estimation. However, existing methods are too complex for massive grant-free access in massive MIMO. This letter proposes pilot detection reference signal (PDRS) to greatly reduce the complexity. In PDRS scheme, no iteration is required. Direct weight estimation is also proposed to calculate combining weights without channel estimation. After combining, PDRS recovery errors are used to decide the pilot activity. The simulation results show that the proposed grant-free sch…
Semi-grant-free (SGF) transmission scheme enables grant-free (GF) users to utilize resource blocks allocated for grant-based (GB) users while maintaining the quality of service of GB users. This work investigates the secrecy performance of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-aided SGF systems. First, analytical expressions for the exact and asymptotic secrecy outage probability (SOP) of NOMA-aided SGF systems with a single GF user are derived. Then, the SGF systems with multiple GF users and the best-user scheduling scheme is considered. Analytical expressions for the exact and asymptotic SO…
Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) is a potential multiple access framework for short-packet internet-of-things (IoT) networks to enhance connectivity. However, the resource allocation problem in GF-NOMA is challenging due to the absence of closed-loop power control. We design a prototype of transmit power pool (PP) to provide open-loop power control. IoT users acquire their transmit power in advance from this prototype PP solely according to their communication distances. Firstly, a multi-agent deep Q-network (DQN) aided GF-NOMA algorithm is proposed to determine the optimal …
We propose to use second order Reed-Muller (RM) sequence for user identification in 5G grant-free access. The benefits of RM sequences mainly lie in two folds, (i) support of much larger user space, hence lower collision probability and (ii) lower detection complexity. These two features are essential to meet the massive connectivity ($10^7$ links/km$^2$), ultra-reliable and low-latency requirements in 5G, e.g., one-shot transmission ($\leq 1$ms) with $\leq 10^{-4}$ packet error rate. However, the non-orthogonality introduced during sequence space expansion leads to worse detection performance…
Grant-free random access (RA) with massive MIMO is a promising RA technique with low signaling overhead that provides significant benefits in increasing the channel reuse efficiency. 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 high success rate of grant-free RA…
The flourishing low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation communication network provides a promising solution for seamless coverage services to Internet-of-Things (IoT) terminals. However, confronted with massive connectivity and rapid variation of terrestrial-satellite link (TSL), the traditional grant-free random-access schemes always fail to match this scenario. In this paper, a new non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) transmission protocol that incorporates orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation is proposed to solve these problems. Furthermore, we propose a two-stages joint active us…
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…
Enabled by hybrid grant-based (GB) and grant-free (GF) transmission techniques, GF users of internet of things (IoT) devices and massive machine-type communications (mMTC) meet opportunities to share wireless resources with GB users. In this paper, we propose a rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) strategy for an emerging semi-grant-free (SGF) transmission system to increase connectivity and reliability. In the proposed RSMA assisted SGF (RSMA-SGF) scheme, the GF users apply the rate splitting principle to realize distributed contentions and utilize transmit power most effectively for robust …
Grant-free (GF) transmission holds promise in terms of low latency communication by directly transmitting messages without waiting for any permissions. However, collision situations may frequently happen when limited spectrum is occupied by numerous GF users. The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique can be a promising solution to achieve massive connectivity and fewer collisions for GF transmission by multiplexing users in power domain. We utilize a semi-grant-free (semi-GF) NOMA scheme for enhancing network connectivity and spectral efficiency by enabling grant-based (GB) and GF us…
With the blooming of Internet-of-Things (IoT), we are witnessing an explosion in the number of IoT terminals, triggering an unprecedented demand for ubiquitous wireless access globally. In this context, the emerging low-Earth-orbit satellites (LEO-SATs) have been regarded as a promising enabler to complement terrestrial wireless networks in providing ubiquitous connectivity and bridging the ever-growing digital divide in the expected next-generation wireless communications. Nevertheless, the harsh conditions posed by LEO-SATs have imposed significant challenges to the current multiple access (…
Consider an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system that monitors a number of multi-valued events through multiple sensors sharing the same bandwidth. Each sensor measures data correlated to one or more events, and communicates to the fusion center at a base station using grant-free random access whenever the corresponding event is active. The base station aims at detecting the active events, and, for each active event, to determine a scalar value describing each active event's state. A conventional solution based on Separate Source-Channel (SSC) coding would use a separate codebook for each sensor an…
Terrestrial and satellite communication networks often rely on two-hop wireless architectures with an access channel followed by backhaul links. Examples include Cloud-Radio Access Networks (C-RAN) and Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite systems. Furthermore, communication services characterized by the coexistence of heterogeneous requirements are emerging as key use cases. This paper studies the performance of critical service (CS) and non-critical service (NCS) for Internet of Things (IoT) systems sharing a grant-free channel consisting of radio access and backhaul segments. On the radio access …
Device activity detection and channel estimation for massive grant-free access under frequency-selective fading have unfortunately been an outstanding problem. This paper aims to address the challenge. Specifically, we present an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based massive grant-free access scheme for a wideband system with one M-antenna base station (BS), N single-antenna Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and P channel taps. We obtain two different but equivalent models for the received pilot signals under frequency-selective Rayleigh fading. Based on each model, we formul…
In this paper, we propose a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based communication framework that allows machine type devices (MTDs) to access the network while avoiding congestion. The proposed technique is a 2-step mechanism that first employs fast uplink grant to schedule the devices without sending a request to the base station (BS). Secondly, NOMA pairing is employed in a distributed manner to reduce signaling overhead. Due to the limited capability of information gathering at the BS in massive scenarios, learning techniques are best fit for such problems. Therefore, multi-arm bandit l…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted semi-grant-free (SGF) transmission has recently received significant research attention due to its outstanding ability of serving grant-free (GF) users with grant-based (GB) users' spectrum, which greatly improves the spectrum efficiency and effectively relieves the massive access problem of 5G and beyond networks. In this paper, we first study the outage performance of the greedy best user scheduling SGF scheme (BU-SGF) by considering the impacts of Rayleigh fading, path loss, and random user locations. In order to tackle the admission fairness p…
In this paper, we consider the problem of activity detection in grant-free code-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). We focus on performing activity detection via subspace methods under a setup where the data and pilot spreading signatures are of different lengths, and consider a realistic frame-structure similar to existing mobile networks. We investigate the impact of channel correlation on the activity detection performance; first, we consider the case where the channel exhibits high correlation in time and frequency and show how it can heavily deteriorate the performance. To tackl…
The performance of grant-free random access (GF-RA) is limited by the number of accessible random access resources (RRs) due to the absence of collision resolution. Compressive sensing (CS)-based RA schemes scale up the RRs at the expense of increased non-orthogonality among transmitted signals. This paper presents the design of multi-sequence spreading random access (MSRA) which employs multiple spreading sequences to spread the different symbols of a user as opposed to the conventional schemes in which a user employs the same spreading sequence for each symbol. We show that MSRA provides cod…
This paper investigates joint channel estimation and device activity detection in the LEO satellite-enabled grant-free random access systems with large differential delay and Doppler shift. In addition, the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) with orthogonal time-frequency space modulation (OTFS) is utilized to combat the dynamics of the terrestrial-satellite link. To simplify the computation process, we estimate the channel tensor in parallel along the delay dimension. Then, the deep learning and expectation-maximization approach are integrated into the generalized approximate message passi…
This paper investigates the massive connectivity of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) for seamless global coverage. We propose to integrate the grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) paradigm with the emerging orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation to accommodate the massive IoT access, and mitigate the long round-trip latency and severe Doppler effect of terrestrial-satellite links (TSLs). On this basis, we put forward a two-stage successive active terminal identification (ATI) and channel estimation (CE) scheme as well as a low-complexity …
Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu（奥卢大学无线通信中心）
Grant-free random access and uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have been introduced to reduce transmission latency and signaling overhead in massive machine-type communication (mMTC). In this paper, we propose two novel group-based deep neural network active user detection (AUD) schemes for the grant-free sparse code multiple access (SCMA) system in mMTC uplink framework. The proposed AUD schemes learn the nonlinear mapping, i.e., multi-dimensional codebook structure and the channel characteristic. This is accomplished through the received signal which incorporates the sparse struct…
Massive access is one of the main use cases of beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks and massive MIMO is a key technology for supporting it. Prior works studied massive access in the co-located massive MIMO framework. In this paper, we investigate the activity detection in grant-free random access for massive machine type communications (mMTC) in cell-free massive MIMO network. Each active device transmits a pre-assigned non-orthogonal pilot sequence to the APs and the APs send the received signals to a central processing unit (CPU) for joint activity detection. We formulate the maximum likelihood…
Multi-user shared access (MUSA) is introduced as advanced code domain non-orthogonal complex spreading sequences to support a massive number of machine-type communications (MTC) devices. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network (DNN)-based multiple user detection (MUD) for grant-free MUSA systems. The DNN-based MUD model determines the structure of the sensing matrix, randomly distributed noise, and inter-device interference during the training phase of the model by several hidden nodes, neuron activation units, and a fit loss function. The thoroughly learned DNN model is capable …
In this paper, we generate a transmit power pool (PP) for Internet of things (IoT) networks with semi-grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (SGF-NOMA) via multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MA-DRL) to enable open loop power control (PC). The PP is mapped with each resource block (RB) to achieve distributed power control (DPC). We first formulate the resource allocation problem as stochastic Markov game, and then solve it using two MA-DRL algorithms, namely double deep Q network (DDQN) and Dueling DDQN. Each GF user as an agent tries to find out the optimal transmit power level and RB…
Existing works on grant-free access, proposed to support massive machine-type communication (mMTC) for the Internet of things (IoT), mainly concentrate on narrow band systems under flat fading. However, little is known about massive grant-free access for wideband systems under frequency-selective fading. This paper investigates massive grant-free access in a wideband system under frequency-selective fading. First, we present an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based massive grant-free access scheme. Then, we propose two different but equivalent models for the received pilot si…
Zonguldak Bulent Ecevit University（宗古尔达克布伦特·埃杰维特大学）；Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）
In this letter, we propose a deep learning-aided multi-user detection (DeepMuD) in uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to empower the massive machine-type communication where an offline-trained Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based network is used for multi-user detection. In the proposed DeepMuD, a perfect channel state information (CSI) is also not required since it is able to perform a joint channel estimation and multi-user detection with the pilot responses, where the pilot-to-frame ratio is very low. The proposed DeepMuD improves the error performance of the uplink NOMA significan…
Future wireless networks need to support massive machine type communication (mMTC) where a massive number of devices accesses the network and massive MIMO is a promising enabling technology. Massive access schemes have been studied for co-located massive MIMO arrays. In this paper, we investigate the activity detection in grant-free random access for mMTC in cell-free massive MIMO networks using distributed arrays. Each active device transmits a non-orthogonal pilot sequence to the access points (APs) and the APs send the received signals to a central processing unit (CPU) for joint activity d…
Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme is considered as a promising candidate for the enabling of massive connectivity and reduced signalling overhead for Internet of Things (IoT) applications in massive machine-type communication (mMTC) networks. Exploiting the inherent nature of sporadic transmissions in the grant-free NOMA systems, compressed sensing based multiuser detection (CS-MUD) has been deemed as a powerful solution to user activity detection (UAD) and data detection (DD). In this paper, block coordinate descend (BCD) method is employed in CS-MUD to reduce the comput…
Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) are poised to provide ubiquitous connectivity for billions of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, the required low-latency massive access necessitates a paradigm shift in the design of random access schemes, which invokes a need of efficient joint activity and data detection (JADD) algorithms. By exploiting the feature of sporadic traffic in massive access, a beacon-aided slotted grant-free massive access solution is proposed. Specifically, we spread the uplink access signals in multiple subcarriers with pre-equalization processing and formulat…
Structured-Sparsity-Aware Joint User Activity Detection and Channel Estimation for OTFS-Based Grant-Free Random Access
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学集成服务网络国家重点实验室）；AUMOVIO Germany GmbH（奥莫维欧德国有限公司）；University of California at Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
