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Supporting ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) is a major challenge of 5G wireless networks. Stringent delay and reliability requirements need to be satisfied for both scheduled and non-scheduled URLLC traffic to enable a diverse set of 5G applications. Although physical and media access control layer solutions have been investigated to satisfy only scheduled URLLC traffic, there is a lack of study on enabling transmission of non-scheduled URLLC traffic, especially in coexistence with the scheduled URLLC traffic. Machine learning (ML) is an important enabler for such a co-existence scenario due to its ability to exploit spatial/temporal correlation in user behaviors and use of radio resources. Hence, in this paper, we first study the coexistence design challenges, especially the radio resource management (RRM) problem and propose a distributed risk-aware ML solution for RRM. The proposed solution benefits from hybrid orthogonal/non-orthogonal radio resource slicing, and proactively regulates the spectrum needed for satisfying delay/reliability requirement of each URLLC traffic type. A case study is introduced to investigate the potential of the proposed RRM in serving coexisting URLLC traffic types. The results further provide insights on the benefits of leveraging intelligent RRM, e.g. a 75% increase in data rate with respect to the conservative design approach for the scheduled traffic is achieved, while the 99.99% reliability of both scheduled and nonscheduled traffic types is satisfied.

Radio access management plays a vital role in delay and energy consumption of connected devices. The radio access in existing cellular networks is unable to efficiently support massive connectivity, due to its signaling overhead. In this paper, we investigate an asynchronous grant-free narrowband data transmission protocol that aims to provide low energy consumption and delay, by relaxing the synchronization/reservation requirement at the cost of sending several packet copies at the transmitter side and more complex signal processing at the receiver side. Specifically, the timing and frequency offsets, as well as sending of multiple replicas of the same packet, are exploited as form of diversities at the receiver-side to trigger successive interference cancellation. The proposed scheme is investigated by deriving closed-form expressions for key performance indicators, including reliability and battery-lifetime. The performance evaluation indicates that the scheme can be tuned to realize long battery lifetime radio access for low-complexity devices. The obtained results indicate existence of traffic load regions, where synchronous access outperforms asynchronous access and vice versa.

In this paper, we investigate energy-efficient clustering and medium access control (MAC) for cellular-based M2M networks to minimize device energy consumption and prolong network battery lifetime. First, we present an accurate energy consumption model that considers both static and dynamic energy consumptions, and utilize this model to derive the network lifetime. Second, we find the cluster size to maximize the network lifetime and develop an energy-efficient cluster-head selection scheme. Furthermore, we find feasible regions where clustering is beneficial in enhancing network lifetime. We further investigate communications protocols for both intra-and inter-cluster communications. While inter-cluster communications use conventional cellular access schemes, we develop an energy-efficient and load-adaptive multiple access scheme, called n-phase CSMA/CA, which provides a tunable tradeoff between energy efficiency, delay, and spectral efficiency of the network. The simulation results show that the proposed clustering, cluster-head selection, and communications protocol design outperform the others in energy saving and significantly prolong the lifetimes of both individual nodes and the whole M2M network. Index TermsMachine to Machine communications, Internet of Things, MAC, Energy efficiency, Lifetime, Delay.Accepted in IEEE Transactions on communications. 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, collecting new collected works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Internet of Things (IoT) enables smart devices to participate more actively in everyday life, business, industry, and health care. Among large-scale applications, cheap and widely spread machine-to-machine (M2M) communications supported by cellular networks will be one of the most important enablers for the success of IoT [1]. M2M communications, also known as machine-type communications (MTC), means the communications of machine devices without human intervention [2]. The characteristics of MTC are: small packet payload, periodic or eventdriven traffic, extremely high node density, limited power supply, limited computational capacity, and limited radio front-ends. Also, smart devices are usually battery-driven and long battery life is crucial for them, especially for devices in remote areas, as there would be a huge amount of maintenance effort if their battery lives are short. Based on the 5G envision from Nokia[3], the bit-per-joule energy efficiency for cellular-based machine-type communications must be improved by a factor of ten in order to provide 10 years of battery lifetimes. A. Literature studyThe lifetime issue in M2M networks is similar to that in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the following, we briefly introduce state-of-the-art medium access control (MAC) and clustering design for both wireless senso...