Statistical Learning-Based Grant-Free Access for Delay-Sensitive Internet of Things Applications

Mission-critical Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications require communication interfaces that provide ultra-reliability and low latency. Acquiring knowledge regarding the number of active devices and their latency-reliability requirements becomes essential to optimize resource allocation in heterogeneous networks. Due to the inherent heavy computation overheads, the conventional centralized decision-making approaches result in large latency. The distributed computing and device-level prediction of network parameters can play a significant role in designing mission-critical IoT applications operating in dynamic environments. This paper considers the medium access control (MAC) layer of heterogeneous networks employing a framed-ALOHA-based restricted transmission strategy to enhance reliability. We present a statistical learning-based device-level network exploration mechanism in which end-devices use their transmission history to predict different network parameters. The IoT devices share the learned parameters with the base station (BS) to identify different groups presented in the network. The simulation results show that the mean square error (MSE) in predicting different network parameters can be reduced by increasing the history window size. In this regard, the optimal size of the history window under the given accuracy constraints is also determined. We demonstrate that the proposed device-level network load prediction mechanism is more robust as compared to the BS-centered approach.