An Efficient NB-IoT Compatible GF-NOMA PHY Mechanism for mMTC

The third-generation partnership project (3GPP) has proposed the narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) standard for serving Internet of Things (IoT) users. Improvements to the NB-IoT standard are being considered to efficiently support massive machine-type communication (mMTC) IoT applications. Subsequent releases of the NB-IoT standard envision to support mMTC using different access mechanisms. In this work, a grant-free (GF) nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system compatible with the current NB-IoT standard is proposed, where the resources are divided into transmission opportunities (TOs). The TOs are further divided into multiple groups based on the repetitions adopted by the users in the system. Physical (PHY) layer procedures for preamble transmission/detection, channel estimation, data transmission/decoding, and acknowledgment (ACK) transmission/reception are described in detail for the proposed GF-NOMA system. Specifically, the preamble sequences are also used as spreading sequences for data transmission and three types of sequences—Zadoff–Chu, random Gaussian, and Golay sequences are explored. Results are presented for per-user success probability, latency, and energy consumption considering two NB-IoT compatible settings along with repetitions and retransmissions. It is demonstrated that the proposed GF-NOMA scheme meets the mMTC requirement recommended by the 3GPP with more than 99% per-user success probability and with the energy consumption reduced by at least 80% compared to NB-IoT, while being readily compatible with the current NB-IoT standard.