A Novel Approach for Extended Network Coverage in Cell-free IoT

Abstract

Consumer electronics is emerging with expanded internet-of-things (IoT) enabled massive machine type communication (mMTC). It involves the intelligent connection between the consumer devices, network nodes, mobile nodes and other communicating nodes. The information flow between the large number of communicating nodes need to be seamless so as to avoid traffic congestion at the nodes. The poor signal quality and subsequent call drops mainly at the cell-edges is a challenge which degrades the performance of the IoT services. A novel dynamic method for the expanded IoT network based on cell-free scheme is presented. It aims for extended network coverage and offers quality-of-service (QoS) even to the edge sensor nodes. A practical communication network is proposed in which the IoT nodes are given service by a set of access points (APs). The presented framework is evaluated for per node spectral efficiency which is also supported through mathematical formulations. Further, the performance comparison with two other conventional schemes is carried out. It is observed that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional schemes and improves the spectral efficiency per node by 20.18 % for the nodes located at the cell-edges. In the end, the role of different receive combiners on the system performance is evaluated.