Ultrareliable SWIPT using Unscheduled Short Packet Transmissions

Abstract

Large communication networks, e.g. Internet of Things (IoT), are known to be vulnerable to the co-channel interference from simultaneous transmissions. In the recent time, this problem has been extensively studied in various contexts. Due to a potentially very long duty cycle, orthogonal multiple access techniques are not well suited for such schemes. Instead, random medium access (RMA) seems promising, since it guarantees a lower bound for the network throughput even in presence of an infinite number of simultaneous transmissions while reducing the average length of the duty cycle. Such an RMA scheme is based on transmission of short data packets with unknown scheduling. Of course, a reliable symbol detection for this type of communication is very challenging not only due to a large amount of interference from the adjacent nodes, but also because of the uncertainty related to the presence or absence of overlapping packets. Interestingly, with increasing number of network nodes also the amount of energy, which can be harvested from the received signal, increases. This is especially beneficial for powering of a relay device, which may utilize the energy for further information processing and retransmission. In this paper, we address the design of a simultaneous information and power transfer scheme based on unscheduled short packet transmissions for ultrareliable communication.