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 wireless IoT connectivity technologies based on coverage range and review diverse types of connectivity technologies with different specifications. We also point out key technical challenges of the existing connectivity technologies for enabling massive IoT connectivity. To address the challenges, we further review and discuss some examples of promising technologies such as compressive sensing (CS) random access, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) based random access that could be employed in future standards for supporting IoT connectivity. Finally, a classification of IoT applications is considered in terms of various service requirements. For each group of classified applications, we outline its suitable IoT connectivity options.

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 grantfree 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 attractive RA technique with low signaling overhead that could simultaneously accommodate a number of RA users, which is multiple times the number of RA channels, with close-to-one success probability. In addition, when the number of antennas in massive MIMO is sufficiently large, we show that the number of orthogonal preambles would dominate the success probability.

Massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) are two key service types in the fifth-generation (5G) communication systems, pursuing scalability and reliability with low-latency, respectively. These two extreme services are envisaged to agglomerate together into critical mMTC shortly with emerging use cases (e.g., wide-area disaster monitoring, wireless factory automation), creating new challenges to designing wireless systems beyond 5G. While conventional network slicing is effective in supporting a simple mixture of mMTC and URLLC, it is difficult to simultaneously guarantee the reliability, latency, and scalability requirements of critical mMTC (e.g., < 4ms latency, 106 devices/km 2 for factory automation) with limited radio resources. Furthermore, recently proposed solutions to scalable URLLC (e.g., machine learning aided URLLC for driverless vehicles) are ill-suited to critical mMTC whose machine type users have extremely limited energy budget and computing capability that should be tightly optimized for given tasks. In view of this, this paper aims to characterize promising use cases of critical mMTC and search for their possible solutions. To this end, we first review the state-of-theart (SOTA) technologies for separate mMTC and URLLC services and then identify key challenges from conflicting SOTA requirements, followed by potential approaches to prospective critical mMTC solutions at different layers. Index Terms-Ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC), massive machine type communications (mMTC), critical mMTC, 5G, beyond 5G.

Spectrum cartography is the process of constructing a map showing Radio Frequency signal strength over a finite geographical area. Multiple research groups have recently proposed to use spectrum cartography in the context of discovering spectrum holes in space that can be exploited locally in cognitive radio networks. In our novel approach, we exploit the sparsity of primary users in space to formulate the cartography process as a compressive sensing problem. Further, we present a novel algorithm for solving the cartography problem that builds on the well-known Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our approach by simulating a cognitive radio network where primary users are low power wireless microphones. Our simulation results show a significant improvement in reconstruction error, in comparison to two existing compressive sensing based methods.

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 with massive MIMO. With the proposed approach, the success of UE detection and channel estimation for a RA UE depends on two conditions: 1) it is a solvable UE; 2) its super preamble is detected. Accordingly, we theoretically analyze the solvable rate of RA UEs with multiple preambles and propose a reliable UE detection algorithm to obtain the super preambles of RA UEs by exploiting the quasi-orthogonality characteristic of massive MIMO. 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.