Energy-efficient massive cellular IoT shared spectrum access via mobile data aggregators

Abstract

Providing connectivity to a massive number of sensors and machines, commonly known as massive Internet-of-things (IoT), has become a critical use case for fifth-generation new radio (5G-NR).Nevertheless, existing transmission protocols, e.g., orthogonal allocation or spectrum sharing, can be detrimental for cellular users (UEs) and IoT devices due to increased congestion and interference or resource splitting. To this end, we consider to equip cellular networks with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), e.g., drones, acting as mobile data aggregators. Specifically, we propose a transmission protocol for shared spectrum access between IoT devices and UEs, where IoT traffic is collected by drones and then aggregated to the cellular network. Using stochastic geometry, we analyze the performance of the proposed protocol and compare it with existing ones. In addition, we present a stochastic optimization framework that optimizes the transmit power of IoT devices to maximize the average energy-efficiency (EE) of a typical IoT device subject to interference constraints on UEs. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed transmission protocol and power control, showing significant improvements of the EE of IoT devices with minimal degradation on the UE spectral efficiency when compared to existing transmission schemes.

Data Aggregation in Massive Machine Type Communication: Challenges and Solutions

“…The RAN overload schemes such as access class barring and the like, alone cannot fully alleviate the overload problem [91]. Moreover, these methods do not mitigate co-channel interference between cellular UEs and MTCDs and result in increased communication delay for massive MTCDs [92]. Condoluci et al [67] have proposed a 3GPP-compliant architecture for UDNs to solve the issue of simultaneous massive access of MTC along with the arbitary deployment-location issue.…”

“…Hattab and Cabric [92] highlighted the issues raised with the coexistence of cellular UEs and MTCDs and discussed the problems of resource-sharing-based and orthogonal-based solutions. To tackle these issues, they have proposed an architecture which employs UAVs or drones as mobile aggregators.…”

“…Challenges and Limitations: The research on UAVs as data aggregators for MTCDs is still in its infancy and not much research is done in this area. The work in [92] opens new ways of data aggregation by UAVs. However, the proposed architecture requires the location information of HTC and MTCDs along with the number of HTC devices connected to the BS.…”

Optimization of the Energy-Efficient Relay-Based Massive IoT Network

“…It is envisioned that billions of devices will be connected in the 5G IoT network by 2020 to build a smart city [7], [8]. As one major segment of the IoT network, the massive IoT (mIoT) refers to the applications that are enabled by connecting a large number of IoT devices to an internetenabled system [9], [10]. This network is typically used for the scenarios characterized by low power, wide coverage and strong support for devices on a massive scale, such as agriculture production detection, power utilization collection, medical monitoring and vehicle scheduling [11]- [13].…”

Performance Analysis of Uplink Cellular IoT Using Different Deployments of Data Aggregators

“…We note all aforementioned works consider terrestrial aggregators, whereas in this work we also study using aerial ones, e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones. For instance, in [8], using drones as mobile data aggregators is considered from the perspective of the coexistence of IoT devices and legacy cellular users. In this paper, we instead focus on power consumption (or lifetime) and the MCL.…”