Abstract
The diverse Internet-of-things (IoT) applications involve massive machine type communication (mMTC) with large number of communicating nodes. The energy and resource overhead owing to shorter battery lives and limited network resources are the main challenges of mMTC in IoT. To support this massive random access and to overcome these challenges, future wireless networks are envisioned with collision resolution capabilities, reduced latency and ultra-high reliability. This paper presents a novel scheme for 6G assisted massive machine type communication (mMTC) with collision resolution capabilities and reduced latency. A cell-free network model is proposed in which the communication of mMTC devices is assisted through access points (APs) cooperation. The performance of proposed network is evaluated for achieved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and accuracy of node detection for different node locations, fading parameters and cell-areas. With increase in cell area and shadow fading, the SNR achieved by active nodes decreases. Further, an algorithm is proposed in the paper that makes AP clusters for serving the communicating nodes. The tendency of network for successful node detection is determined for different cluster sizes with different activation probabilities. In the end, the proposed algorithm is compared with two other schemes, namely, random clustering scheme and nearest-neighbour clustering scheme. It is found that the proposed approach achieves best performance in the detection of active communicating nodes in the system model with 9.09% improvement as compared to random scheme and 1.1% as compared to nearest-neighbour scheme.