ALOHA-NOMA for Massive Machine-to-Machine IoT Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces ALOHA-NOMA, a scalable and energy-efficient MAC protocol for IoT that combines pure ALOHA with power domain NOMA, significantly boosting throughput for massive machine-to-machine communications.

Contribution

It presents a novel ALOHA-NOMA protocol that enhances throughput and scalability for IoT devices without prior knowledge of transmitters, using multi-hypothesis testing and SIC.

Findings

Throughput increased to 1.27 with 5 users using SIC

Significant throughput gains over classical pure ALOHA

Throughput grows non-linearly with more active devices

Abstract

This paper proposes a new medium access control (MAC) protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) applications incorporating pure ALOHA with power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in which the number of transmitters are not known as a priori information and estimated with multi-hypothesis testing. The proposed protocol referred to as ALOHA-NOMA is not only scalable, energy efficient and matched to the low complexity requirements of IoT devices, but it also significantly increases the throughput. Specifically, throughput is increased to 1.27 with ALOHA-NOMA when 5 users can be separated via a SIC (Successive Interference Cancellation) receiver in comparison to the classical result of 0.18 in pure ALOHA. The results further show that there is a greater than linear increase in throughput as the number of active IoT devices increases.