Machine-type Devices Research Articles

Publish/Subscribe Method for Real-Time Data Processing in Massive IoT Leveraging Blockchain for Secured Storage.

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the surge in Machine-Type Devices (MTDs) has introduced Massive IoT (MIoT), opening new horizons in the world of connected devices. However, such proliferation presents challenges, especially in storing and analyzing massive, heterogeneous data streams in real time. In order to manage Massive IoT data streams, we utilize analytical database software such as Apache Druid version 28.0.0 that excels in real-time data processing. Our approach relies on a publish/subscribe mechanism, where device-generated data are relayed to a dedicated broker, effectively functioning as a separate server. This broker enables any application to subscribe to the dataset, promoting a dynamic and responsive data ecosystem. At the core of our data transmission infrastructure lies Apache Kafka version 3.6.1, renowned for its exceptional data flow management performance. Kafka efficiently bridges the gap between MIoT sensors and brokers, enabling parallel clusters of brokers that lead to more scalability. In our pursuit of uninterrupted connectivity, we incorporate a fail-safe mechanism with two Software-Defined Radios (SDR) called Nutaq PicoLTE Release 1.5 within our model. This strategic redundancy enhances data transmission availability, safeguarding against connectivity disruptions. Furthermore, to enhance the data repository security, we utilize blockchain technology, specifically Hyperledger Fabric, known for its high-performance attributes, ensuring data integrity, immutability, and security. Our latency results demonstrate that our platform effectively reduces latency for 100,000 devices, qualifying as an MIoT, to less than 25 milliseconds. Furthermore, our findings on blockchain performance underscore our model as a secure platform, achieving over 800 Transactions Per Second in a dataset comprising 14,000 transactions, thereby demonstrating its high efficiency.

How to Survive 10 Years’ Life Time for Machine Type Devices: A Study of Random Access With Sleeping-Awake Cycle

How to Survive 10 Years’ Life Time for Machine Type Devices: A Study of Random Access With Sleeping-Awake Cycle

Facing to wireless network densification in 6G: Challenges and opportunities

In the forthcoming 6G wireless networks, the explosive growth in the number of human-type devices and machine-type devices will result in the network densification including both end-device (ED) densification and base station (BS) densification. Owing to the unique features of the network densification, not only new challenging problems would be introduced, but also the techniques, used in conventional networks, would no longer be effective. In this article, the features of network densification in terms of both BS and ED densification are first explored, and new challenges and potential key technologies are introduced.

Deep Learning-Based Activity Detection for Grant-Free Random Access

The cellular Internet of Things wireless network is a promising solution to provide massive connectivity for machine-type devices. However, designing grant-free random access (GF-RA) protocols to manage such connections is challenging, since they must operate in interference-aware scenarios with sporadic device activation patterns and a shortage of mutually orthogonal resources. Supervised machine learning models have provided efficient solutions for activity detection, noncoherent data detection, and nonorthogonal preamble design in scenarios with massive connectivity. In this article, we develop two deep learning (DL) sparse support recovery algorithms to detect active devices in massive machine-type communication random access. The DL algorithms, developed to deploy GF-RA protocols, are based on the deep multilayer perceptron and the convolutional neural network models. Unlike previous works, we investigate the impact of the type of sequences for preamble design on the activity detection accuracy. Our results reveal that preambles based on the Zadoff–Chu sequences, which present good correlation properties, achieve better activity detection accuracy with the proposed algorithms than random sequences. Besides, we demonstrate that our DL algorithms achieve activity detection accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art techniques with extremely low computational complexity.

Energy efficiency and delay determinacy tradeoff in energy harvesting-powered zero-touch deterministic industrial M2M communications

Data transmission for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs) is of the utmost importance, especially in the Industry 5.0 era, where human–machine collaboration is increasingly intensive. On the one hand, as a key characteristic for Industry 5.0, deterministic transmission aims to ensure the data arrive at destination devices accurately, has attracted remarkable attentions. On the other hand, energy efficiency problem is another major concern in Industry 5.0 since the massive Machine-Type Devices (MTDs). Consequently, in this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between energy efficiency and delay determinacy in energy harvesting-powered Zero-Touch Deterministic Industrial Machine-to-Machine (ZT-DI-M2M) communications. In particular, we first derive the probability of the transmission delay falling within a certain time window to characterize the delay determinacy and then figure out the relationship between delay determinacy and the energy efficiency by taking the system control performance into account. After that, in order to model the uncertainty of the stochastic environment, we formulate the problem as a stochastic game by jointly considering transmission power control, frequency spectrum allocation and the selection of base stations. Afterwards, a random graph-based sparse Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is proposed to solve the optimization problem while reducing the computational complexity. Finally, numerical result demonstrates that the proposed sparse LSTM algorithm enables to achieve a specific delay determinacy with a higher energy efficiency as compared to Deep Q-Learning Network (DQN) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithms. In addition, we also analysis the influence of sparse coefficient and the size of time window on the relationship between energy efficiency and delay determinacy.

Joint Coherent and Non-Coherent Detection and Decoding Techniques for Heterogeneous Networks

Cellular networks that are traditionally designed for human-type communication (HTC) have the potential to provide cost effective connectivity to machine-type communication (MTC). However, MTC is characterized by unprecedented traffic in cellular networks, thus posing a challenge to its successful incorporation. In this work, we propose a unified framework for amicable coexistence of MTC and HTC. We consider a heterogeneous network where machine-type devices coexist with enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) devices and propose transceiver techniques that promote efficient signal recovery from these devices. For this, we present an eMBB pilot and MTC data generation strategy that facilitates joint coherent decoding of eMBB data and non-coherent decoding of MTC data. Furthermore, we assess the feasibility of coexistence using receiver operating characteristics, outage probability, and normalized mean square error (NMSE). Our numerical results reveal that a harmonious coexistence of the heterogeneous services can be achieved with properly configured average signal-to-noise ratios and pilot length.

Grant-Free Random Access With Channel Differentiation in Massive MIMO Systems

This paper investigates the uplink access for massive machine-type communication (mMTC) in massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) systems with coexisting line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) channels. A grant-free random access scheme with channel differentiation (CD-GFRA) is proposed to handle the massive access for this scenario, in which machine-type devices (MTDs) attempt to access the network with two different strategies according to their channel conditions. In CD-GFRA, MTDs with angle-dependent LOS channels access the network directly, while NLOS-channel MTDs transmit with the assistance of random relays. Moreover, an angle of arrival (AOA) based channel estimation is further proposed to improve the access capacity of LOS-channel MTDs. Numerical results show that the proposed CD-GFRA significantly improves the access success probability of MTDs in poor coverage areas and achieves almost triple the throughput of the conventional scheme for a high MTD density.

Joint Space-Time Sparsity Based Jamming Detection for Mission-Critical mMTC Networks

For mission-critical massive machine-type communications (mMTC) applications, the messages are required to be delivered in real-time. However, due to the weak security protection capabilities of the low-cost and low-complexity machine-type devices, active jamming attack in the uplink access is a serious threat. Uplink access jamming (UAJ) can increase the number of dropped/retransmitted packets and restrict or prevent the normal device access. To tackle this vital and challenging problem, we propose a novel UAJ detection method based on the joint space-time sparsity (JSTS). Our key insight is that the JSTS-based feature will be significantly impacted if UAJ happens, since only a small fraction of the devices are active and the traffic pattern for each device is sporadic in the normal state. Unlike the existing detection methods under batch mode (i.e., all sample observations are collected before making a decision), the JSTS-based detection is performed in a sequential manner by processing the received signals one by one, which can detect UAJ as quickly as possible. Moreover, the proposed JSTS-based method does not rely on the prior knowledge of the attackers, since it only cares the abrupt change in the JSTS-based feature on each frame. Numerical results evaluate and confirm the effectiveness of our method.

Data Aggregation-based Transmission Method in Ultra-Dense Wireless Networks

As the Internet of Things (IoT) advances, machine-type devices are densely deployed and massive networks such as ultra-dense networks (UDNs) are formed. Various devices attend to the network to transmit data using machine-type communication (MTC), whereby numerous, various are generated. MTC devices generally have resource constraints and use wireless communication. In this kind of network, data aggregation is a key function to provide transmission efficiency. It can reduce the number of transmitted data in the network, and this leads to energy saving and reducing transmission delays. In order to effectively operate data aggregation in UDNs, it is important to select an aggregation point well. The total number of transmitted data may vary, depending on the aggregation point to which the data are delivered. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel data aggregation scheme to select the appropriate aggregation point and describe the data transmission method applying the proposed aggregation scheme. In addition, we evaluate the proposed scheme with extensive computer simulations. Better performances in the proposed scheme are achieved compared to the conventional approach.

Mean Field Game-Theoretic Framework for Distributed Power Control in Hybrid NOMA

The steady expansion of the number of wireless devices and the ubiquity of the networks give rise to various interesting challenges for the future sixth generation (6G) of wireless communication systems. Particularly, the operators have to handle massive connectivity among Machine Type Devices (MTDs) and increasing demand for eMMB through limited spectrum resources. Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has been spotlighted as an emerging technology to meet the above-mentioned challenges. In this paper, we consider a densely deployed network in which users are divided into NOMA coalitions. Firstly, we model the power allocation problem as a differential game. Then, we extend the formulated game using a Mean Field Game (MFG) theoretic framework by considering the effect of the collective behavior of devices. Furthermore, we derive a distributed power control algorithm that enables the users to appropriately regulate their transmit power according to brief information received from the BS. Indeed, the analysis of the proposed approach is governed by the two fundamental Hamilton- Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) and Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov (FPK) equations. Numerical results are presented to analyze the equilibrium behaviors of the proposed power control algorithm and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the formulated MFG compared to existing works in the literature.

Grant-Free Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in Single-Carrier Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

Grant-free (GF) access is one key technology for massive machine-type communication (mMTC) in Internet-of-things. Single-carrier (SC) modulation has higher power-efficiency than multicarrier modulation such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, due to lower peak-to-average power ratio, and thus is specifically suitable for low-power-supply machine-type devices. In this paper, we study both the coherent and non-coherent grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) schemes where SC modulation is employed in frequency selective fading channels. For coherent SC-GF-NOMA, the linear input-output relation is first presented, and two user-activity detection (UAD) algorithms, block covariance-based maximum-likelihood detection (CB-MLD) and turbo approximated message passing (Turbo AMP), are proposed. In block CB-MLD, a block update strategy is introduced in the coordinate descent iteration to utilize the special block-sparsity signal property inherent in coherent SC-GF-NOMA. Moreover, Turbo AMP consists of two components, AMP and message passing (MP), and turbo iteration between them. Concretely, AMP is designed for UAD-CE with fixed active user probability, and MP is designed to update the active user probability by utilizing the block sparsity. Moreover, the performance of Turbo AMP is analyzed by state-evolution (SE) formalism. For non-coherent SC-GF-NOMA, the linear input-output relation is first derived from which the hierarchical block-sparsity signal property is observed, and then block CB-MLD-based UAD algorithm is presented to utilize this signal property. Finally, computer simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in both coherent and non-coherent SC-GF-NOMA.

Energy-Efficient Wake-Up Signalling for Machine-Type Devices Based on Traffic-Aware Long Short-Term Memory Prediction

Reducing energy consumption is a pressing issue in low-power machine-type communication (MTC) networks. In this regard, the Wake-up Signal (WuS) technology, which aims to minimize the energy consumed by the radio interface of the machine-type devices (MTDs), stands as a promising solution. However, state-of-the-art WuS mechanisms use static operational parameters, so they cannot efficiently adapt to the system dynamics. To overcome this, we design a simple but efficient neural network to predict MTC traffic patterns and configure WuS accordingly. Our proposed forecasting WuS (FWuS) leverages an accurate long-short term memory (LSTM)- based traffic prediction that allows extending the sleep time of MTDs by avoiding frequent page monitoring occasions in idle state. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our approach. The traffic prediction errors are shown to be below 4%, being false alarm and miss-detection probabilities respectively below 8.8% and 1.3%. In terms of energy consumption reduction, FWuS can outperform the best benchmark mechanism in up to 32%. Finally, we certify the ability of FWuS to dynamically adapt to traffic density changes, promoting low-power MTC scalability

Queue-Aware Access Prioritization for Massive Machine-Type Communication

One of the pivotal services of the fifth generation (5G) of cellular technology is massive Machine-type Communications (mMTCs), which is intended to support connecting high density of machine-type devices (MTDs). Random access channel of long-term evolution (LTE)/LTE advanced needs to be modified in order to support the large simultaneous arrival of MTDs. 3GPP suggested access class barring (ACB) as a mechanism to inhibit network congestion in the mMTC or massive Internet of Things (IoT) scenario. Consequently, in devices that are repeatedly ignored by ACB, the queue of data packets keeps growing. In storage-constrained IoT nodes with limited buffer, this may lead to packet drop due to buffer overflow, causing a decline in the overall throughput of the system. To address this issue, a novel queue-aware prioritized access classification (QPAC)-based ACB technique is proposed in this article, where MTDs having data queue size close to its buffer limit are dynamically given higher priority in ACB. To study the queue build-up at each MTC device, a node-centric analysis of ACB in the buffer-constrained scenario is performed using a 2-D Markov chain. It is shown that the proposed QPAC scheme, with optimal model parameters obtained by maximizing overall system utility, offers up to 70% gain in throughput compared to the nearest competitive dynamic ACB scheme.

Achievable Rate Analysis of Two-Hop Interference Channel With Coordinated IRS Relay

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising 6G technology that can improve wireless communication capacity in a cost-effective and energy-efficient manner, by adjusting a large number of passive reflectors to appropriately change the signal propagation. In this study, we identified the achievable rate region of a two-hop interference channel with distributed multiple IRS relays. To do so, we formulated a non-convex problem that characterizes the rate-profile, and found its solution using successive convex approximation (SCA). We then proposed an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and alternating optimization (AO) based distributed and low-complex IRS control that maximizes the achievable sum-rate, and proved its convergence and optimality. We then compared the proposed IRS control with semi-definite relaxation (SDR)-, random phase-, deep reinforcement learning (DRL)- based IRS controls, and optimal amplify-and-forward (AF)-, interference neutralization (IN)-, and decode-and-forward (DF) based relaying schemes. We demonstrated that the proposed control with multiple IRS elements outperforms the benchmark controls in terms of the achievable rate region, achievable sum-rate, and energy efficiency under same power budget. We also confirmed that the discrete phase approximation of the proposed control provides near-optimal performance with fewer bits, and the proposed control is robust under imperfect CSI condition. The proposed controls can be efficiently applied to large-scale multi-pair multihop device-to-device and machine-type device communications in the interference-limited or low-powered dense networks of 5G and 6G environments.

Theoretical Performance Analysis of Distributed Queue for Massive Machine Type Communications: Throughput, Latency, Energy Consumption

Massive machine type communications (mMTC) is one of main application cases in 5G, which is supposed to support communications of massive number of machine-type devices (MTDs). Distributed queue (DQ) is a variant of tree splitting protocol which combines an m-ary tree splitting algorithm with a set of simple smart rules, organizing every terminal in one out of two virtual queues. Theoretically, DQ allows access to infinite terminals and is stable under any traffic condition, which alleviates the unstable problem of slotted ALOHA, and is especially suitable for mMTC. However, its theoretical comprehensive performance analysis as well as related statistical characteristics is still missing, which severely restricts the full manifestation of its performance advantages. In view of this, the paper proposes a general performance analysis framework for DQ, with which full probability space of DQ evolution process is presented for the first time. To be more specific, probability distribution function (PDF), mean and variance of throughput, latency and energy consumption of DQ is analytically derived to comprehensively evaluate performance. Taking the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for mMTC as example, numerical results validate the accuracy of the proposed analysis framework and the stability of DQ, present effects of number of MTDs, number of contention slots ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), and maximum number of transmissions ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${L}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) on DQ in terms of aforementioned performance metrics. These results together provide good reference to find appropriate value of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${L}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to balance the performance metrics and enable more practical network optimization.

Unsourced Random Massive Access With Beam-Space Tree Decoding

The core requirement of massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC) is to support reliable and fast access for an enormous number of machine-type devices (MTDs). In many practical applications, the base station (BS) only concerns the list of received messages instead of the source information, introducing the emerging concept of unsourced random access (URA). Although some massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) URA schemes have been proposed recently, the unique propagation properties of millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems are not fully exploited in conventional URA schemes. In grant-free random access, the BS cannot perform receive beamforming independently as the identities of active users are unknown to the BS. Therefore, only the intrinsic beam division property can be exploited to improve the decoding performance. In this paper, a URA scheme based on beam-space tree decoding is proposed for mmWave massive MIMO system. Specifically, two beam-space tree decoders are designed based on hard decision and soft decision, respectively, to utilize the beam division property. They both leverage the beam division property to assist in discriminating the sub-blocks transmitted from different users. Besides, the first decoder can reduce the searching space, enjoying a low complexity. The second decoder exploits the advantage of list decoding to recover the miss-detected packets. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed URA schemes compared to the conventional URA schemes in terms of error probability.

Unsourced Massive Random Access Scheme Exploiting Reed-Muller Sequences

The challenge in massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) is to support reliable and instant access for an enormous number of machine-type devices (MTDs). In some particular applications of mMTC, the access point (AP) only has to know the messages received, but not where they source from, thus giving rise to the concept of unsourced random access (URA). In this paper, we propose a novel URA scheme exploiting the elegant properties of Reed-Muller (RM) sequences. Specifically, after dividing the message of an active user into several information chunks, RM sequences are used to carry those chunks, for exploiting the vast sequence space to improve the spectral efficiency, and their nested structure to enable reliable and efficient sequence detection. Next, we further explore a novel structural property of RM sequences for designing sparse patterns which carry part of the information and serve as the hints of coupling the information chunks of a single user. The factors affecting the performance of our slot-based RM detection are characterized. Besides, the complexity of the proposed message stitching method is analyzed and compared to the commonly used tree coding approach. Our simulation results verify the enhanced performance of the proposed URA scheme in error probability and computational complexity compared to the existing counterpart.

The Heterogeneous Demands Satisfaction in IoT Network: Air-Ground Collaborative Deployment

This paper investigates the joint optimization of the three-dimensional (3D) position deployment of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the access UAVs selection of ground machine type devices (MTDs). Cache-enabled UAVs are deployed over the Internet of Things (IoT) networks to provide flexible and reliable delivery services for ground devices. Since each MTD has different data demands and the ultimate goal of communication is to provide personalized services for MTDs, we propose an air-ground collaborative deployment strategy focusing on optimizing users’ satisfaction. In the proposed strategy, the hierarchical game model is proposed. Specifically, the 3D position deployment of multiple UAVs is at the upper layer and the access UAV selection of ground MTDs is at the lower. Since there is no central controller and the users are autonomous, we structure a local interaction game to achieve global optimization for the network satisfaction problem. We design a hierarchical deployment access based log-linear learning (HDALL) algorithm to achieve the desirable solution. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of air-ground collaborative deployment strategy as well as HDALL algorithm.

Hybrid Active-and-Passive Relaying Model for 6G-IoT Greencom Networks with SWIPT.

In order to support a massive number of resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and machine-type devices, it is crucial to design a future beyond 5G/6G wireless networks in an energy-efficient manner while incorporating suitable network coverage expansion methodologies. To this end, this paper proposes a novel two-hop hybrid active-and-passive relaying scheme to facilitate simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) considering both time-switching (TS) and power-splitting (PS) receiver architectures, while dynamically modelling the involved dual-hop time-period (TP) metric. An optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize the throughput, harvested energy, and transmit power of a SWIPT-enabled system with the proposed hybrid scheme. In this regard, we provide two distinct ways to obtain suitable solutions based on the Lagrange dual technique and Dinkelbach method assisted convex programming, respectively, where both the approaches yield an appreciable solution within polynomial computational time. The experimental results are obtained by directly solving the primal problem using a non-linear optimizer. Our numerical results in terms of weighted utility function show the superior performance of the proposed hybrid scheme over passive repeater-only and active relay-only schemes, while also depicting their individual performance benefits over the corresponding benchmark SWIPT systems with the fixed-TP.

Toward Optimal Connection Management for Massive Machine-Type Communications in 5G System

The massive machine-type communications (mMTC) is one of the three generic services for 5G. With the connection-based random access (CBRA) scheme, each machine-type device (MTD) establishes a connection with the base station (BS) prior to its data transmission. Due to the explosive growth of the number of MTDs, many MTDs would establish connections with the BS, which necessitates the study on how to efficiently manage the massive connections with MTDs. To address this issue, in this article, we propose a unified utility-based analytical framework for the optimal connection management of mMTC in 5G networks, where the signaling overhead for connection establishment, access delay, and the connection resource utilization ratio is included. Specifically, we first derive key performance metrics, i.e., the mean time length of each connection and resource utilization ratio, as functions of traffic input rate and inactivity timer. By further considering the signaling overheads and access delay of each MTD, the network utility is formulated and maximized by optimally choosing the inactivity timer. We then present a detailed discussion on the effect of system parameters on the optimal inactivity timer and the corresponding maximum network utility. Finally, we extend the analytical framework to the scenario in which the CBRA scheme coexists with the packet-based random access scheme, i.e., transmitting packets in the random access channel without connection establishment. The critical threshold in terms of the traffic input rate is characterized, which sheds important light on the access scheme selection issue.