Unequal Timeliness Protection Massive Access for Mission Critical Communications in S-IoT

In this paper, we propose three unequal timeliness (UT) protection massive access (UTMA) schemes in satellite-based Internet of Things (S-IoT) for mission critical communications (MCC) user equipments (UEs) with three types of timeliness requirements: independent successive UTMA (IS-UTMA), extended cognitive offloading UTMA (ECO-UTMA), and independent cognitive offloading UTMA (ICO-UTMA). First, MCC UEs are grouped according to their timeliness requirements, and a multi-dimensional codebook is introduced to resolve the UE collisions in massive access. Then, the IS-UTMA exclusively allocates time slots and pilots to different MCC UE groups to perform massive access, while the ECO- and ICO-UTMA allow timeliness critical group to share resources with timeliness tolerant group to improve the system timeliness. To capture the timeliness evaluation of each MCC UE group, we utilize age of information (AoI) to model the information freshness and derive closed-form expressions of average AoI (AAoI) by tracing the access failure probability (AFP) and instantaneous AoI. Furthermore, we establish the parameter optimization problems to minimize AAoI under desired AFP requirements. Extensive simulations validate the accurate of theoretical derivations, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UTMA scheme with joint optimized parameters, which can achieve minimum AAoI under desired AFP than the state-of-the-art schemes.