Energy-Efficient and Reliable IoT Access Without Radio Resource Reservation

One of the major challenges for Internet-of-Things applications is that the existing cellular technologies do not support the uplink IoT traffic in an energy-efficient manner. There are two principal ways for serving the uplink IoT traffic: grant-based (i.e., scheduled) and grant-free (i.e., random access). Grant-based access provides fine-grained control of reliability and latency at the cost of energy consumption required for signaling. Grant-free access removes the signaling overhead at the cost of looser control of performance in terms of reliability and latency. However, a precise analysis of reliability, latency and energy performance of grant-free access (GFA) is largely missing. This article focuses on a GFA-type protocol, in which a device transmits several packet replicas, asynchronously with respect to the other devices. Using stochastic geometry, we derive closed-form expressions for reliability, delay, and energy consumption, which can be used to identify the tradeoffs among these performance parameters. In order to improve the performance of the protocol, we develop a receiver that leverages the random timing and frequency offsets among the devices in order to facilitate resolution of collisions. This is complemented by a per-device adaptive scheme that controls the number of transmitted replicas. The evaluation confirms the validity of the analysis and the potential of the proposed solution, identifying operating regions in which GFA outperforms the grant-based access.