Page 79 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2020

LIGHTWEIGHT AND INSTANT ACCESS TECHNOLOGIES AND PROTOCOLS TO
BOOST DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS

1, 2
Yihua Ma , Zhifeng Yuan , Weimin Li , Zhigang Li
1, 2
1, 2
1, 2
1 ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen, China
2 State Key Laboratory of Mobile Network and Mobile Multimedia, Shenzhen, China

ABSTRACT Novel access technologies are required to realize these trends,
and this paper introduces 4 key enablers: (1) contention-
The further integration of telecommunications and industry based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), (2) the prior
has been considerable and is expected to bring significant knowledge of data, (3) enhanced pilot design and (4) joint
benefits to society and economics. It also leads to some use of diversity and successive interference cancellation
evolution trends for next-generation communication systems, (SIC). NOMA is first proposed in [4], and it usually requires
including further rises in machine-type communications accurate power control and resource allocation. As a
(MTC), uplink-dominated systems, and decentralized comparison, contention-based NOMA gets rid of them and
structures. However, the existing access protocols are not achieves a higher flexibility. The prior knowledge of data can
friendly to these trends. This paper analyzes the problems of be used to improve performance. Data-only transmission is
existing access protocols and provides novel access proposed in [5], which is able to remove the pilot overheads.
technologies to solve them. These technologies include Apart from the data-only scheme, a pilot is still crucial to
contention-based NOMA, data features, enhanced pilot fully utilize a large receiving antenna array where the spatial
design and successive interference cancellation (SIC) of combining search space is huge. Therefore, the pilot should
diversity. With these key enablers, lightweight and instant be well designed to gain a good detection and estimation
access can be realized, and some potential modifications of performance [6] [7]. Moreover, the joint use of diversity and
protocols are analyzed. Finally, this paper uses massive and SIC [8] can deal with the fluctuation of loading as it is
critical scenarios in digital transformations to show the random in contention-based transmissions. This strategy is
great necessity of introducing novel access technologies into able to average the loading in different slots via iterative
future communication protocols. detection and cancellation.

Keywords – Decentralization, digital transformations, With these key enablers, users are able to transmit packets
future access protocols, MTC, uplink without building radio resource control (RRC) connections.
That is to say, a connection-free transmission can be
1. INTRODUCTION achieved, and the transmission no longer relies on RRC
connections. This great enhancement simplifies the
The target of communications varies from connecting transmission procedures a lot, as well as reduces the
humans t connecti everything, and digital overheads and latency of building RRC connections. It also
transformations are expected to penetrate many scenarios leads to some possible modifications to future protocols,
[1]-[3]. Digital transformations are expected to bring which are also analyzed in this paper.
significant benefits to society. Meanwhile, digital
transformations raise many requirements, as well as point out The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
the directions for future communication protocols. introduces the main trends of future radio access networks
and analyzes the problems of existing access protocols. In
To support seamless and handy digital services, there are section 3, some novel access technologies are provided to
some trends in future communications, including: (1) further solve the problems. Section 4 briefly introduces the impact
evolution from human-oriented communications to of these technologies on future protocols. In section 5, two
machine-type communications (MTC), (2) from downlink- important scenarios are discussed to show the advantages of
dominated to uplink-dominated, and (3) from centralization the proposed schemes. Section 6 concludes this paper and
to decentralization. The existing access protocols have not provides some future research directions.
been changed for decades and become great burdens under
these trends. This paper focuses on the lightweight and
instant access technologies and protocols as they are crucial
to fulfilling ultra-low latency and ubiquitous connectivity.

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