Active device detection and performance analysis of massive non-orthogonal transmissions in cellular Internet of Things

This paper investigates multiple access schemes for uplink and downlink transmissions in cellular networks with massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Recall that single-carrier frequency division multiple access and orthogonal frequency division multiple access, which are orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes, have been conventionally adopted for uplink and downlink transmissions in narrow-band IoT, respectively. Unlike these OMA schemes, we propose two non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes for cellular IoT with short-packet transmissions. Especially, a generalized expectation consistent signal recovery-based algorithm is proposed to estimate active devices, channel state information and data in uplink transmission, where all of the active devices are allowed to transmit their pilots and data through the same resource block without authorization. On the other hand, the active devices estimated during uplink transmission are grouped for downlink transmission with a trade-off between performance and detection complexity. Additionally, the data error rates are analysed for both uplink and downlink transmissions with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), where the effects of critical parameters such as the estimation error, ADC bits, packet length, and message bits are revealed. Both simulation and analytical results are provided to demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed NOMA schemes and algorithms, especially for active device, channel, and data estimations. More importantly, the obtained results show that the data error rate performance of downlink NOMA is superior to that of OMA when the message bits of devices in one group are selected following the proposed strategy.