Drone-Aided Networking with Massive Connectivity and High Spectral Efficiency Enabled

Drone-aided networking is considered a potential candidate for internet of things (IoT) networking in 5G and beyond, where drones are deployed to serve a large number of devices simultaneously for data collection, surveillance, remote sensing, etc. However, challenges arise due to massive connectivity requests as well as limited power budgets. To this end, this paper focuses on the design of drone-aided IoT networking, where a drone access point serves a large number of devices for efficient data transmission, collection, and remote sensing. Constant envelope signaling such as minimum shift keying (MSK) family is considered to avoid potential significant power inefficiency due to nonlinear distortion. To this end, code-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is developed and analyzed in terms of achievable sum spectral efficiency. Further, power allocation is derived based on the aforementioned analysis and is demonstrated to offer significantly improved performance in terms of sum spectral efficiency and user load. Simulation results confirm the feasibility of the proposed design and shows that the designed system can attain the promised performance using either simple convolutional code or complex polar code. The proposed system can be used in scenarios such as deep space communications, where MSK family signaling is adopted as well.