Frame-Based Random Access with Interference Cancellation across Frames for Massive Machine Type Communications

One of the main requirements for next generation mobile or wireless communication systems is to effectively support a large number of machine type communication devices for Internet of things applications. In order to improve the random access capability in frame-based slotted Aloha environments, coded random access techniques have been proposed, in which multiple copies of a packet are transmitted per frame and the copies are cancelled out from the received signal if any single copy is successfully received. They, however, may increase the transmission power by sending multiple copies per frame. Above all, for systems with a small number of slots per frame, they may not be able to improve the performance by readily reaching a congested state. This paper proposes a new frame-based random access scheme, which sends at most one copy of a packet per frame but uses interference cancellation to improve the performance. If a successfully received packet is a retransmitted one, the previously transmitted signals for the packet can be cancelled out from the received signals for trying to decode other received packets. The proposed scheme has different characteristics than coded random access schemes and can be also combined with them to further improve the performance.