GFDM-Based Asynchronous Grant-Free Multiple-Access

Abstract

For next-generation Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, asynchronous instant transmission has attracted increasing research interest with the expectation of achieving near-zero latency without excessive initiation procedure. However, in an asynchronous multiple-access scenario, there exist significant inter-carrier interference between sub-carriers allocated to different users. To suppress out-of-band emission (OOBE) of each sub-carrier, a new generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) has been proposed, which has lower OOBE than the conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this paper, by using GFDM, two types of receivers are proposed with the aim of reducing latency and improving throughput: a GFDM-based minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver and a GFDM-based MMSE-successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver. Then, we develop a lightweight scheme using an epsilon-conservative rate control with GFDM-based MMSE receivers and also invent a performance-focused scheme using an advanced rate control with GFDM-based MMSE-SIC receivers. In particular, the latter scheme provides higher throughput with limited increase in computational load of user equipments. Numerical results show that with a high successful transmission probability higher than 99 %, the performance-focused scheme and the lightweight scheme achieve up to 85 % and up to 70 % higher throughput compared to the conventional OFDM-based asynchronous multiple-access scheme, respectively. Furthermore, since our proposal does not require any centralized user scheduling or initiation procedure, it presents a significant reduction in latency compared to the existing low-latency technologies.