Low-Cost Design of Massive Access for Cellular Internet of Things

In this paper, we investigate the issue of low-cost design of massive access for cellular internet of things (IoT) over spatially correlated Rician fading channels. Specifically, by exploiting a low-overhead transmission protocol, a base station (BS) equipped with a large-scale antenna array and low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is deployed to serve a massive number of IoT devices with low-complexity successive interference cancellation (SIC) receivers. We first analyze the impacts of the low-cost design on the system performance and derive closed-form expressions for uplink and downlink spectral efficiencies of the cellular IoT. Then, for alleviating the negative impacts of the low-cost design, we propose an algorithm allocating the time for channel estimation, uplink data transmission, and downlink data transmission in a data frame. Finally, extensive simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed low-cost design for the cellular IoT.