Enabling Concurrent IoT Transmissions in Distributed C-RAN

As rapid expansion of the low-cost next billion devices, wireless sensor networks (WSN) undertake much denser low-end internet of things (IoT) nodes nowadays. In the meantime, the future next 5 generation (5G) radio base stations (BS) are granted more capabilities. Distributed cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is becoming available for the future massive WSN. However, real-world distributed C-RAN is less explored for low-end IoT based WSN due to its difficulties in implementation. In this paper, we built a distributed C-RAN which has tens of distributed radio frontends using USRP N210s in a 20 × 20 × 3 m3 area. By exploiting the inherent hardware properties of low-end IoT devices and the spatial diversity of distributed C-RAN system, we show the distributed C-RAN can potentially decode collided signals from low-end IoT devices with all signal processing been done on the cloud.