An Enhanced Random Access with Preamble-Assisted Short-Packet Transmissions for Cellular IoT Communications

We propose an enhanced random access (RA) with preamble-assisted short-packet transmissions to support cellular Internet-of-things (IoT) communications. A key feature of the proposed scheme is that the base station (e.g., eNodeB in LTE networks) utilizes the RA preambles as uplink reference signals to estimate uplink channel state information of IoT devices, which subsequently provides additional opportunities to transmit short-packets during the RA procedure without extra signaling (e.g., connection and scheduling requests). Through simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of a channel estimation mean squared error, a bit error rate, a preamble collision probability, and a success probability of short-packet transmissions. The results show that the proposed scheme can support reliable and low-latency featured short-packet transmissions during the RA procedure by efficiently incorporating both multiple antenna and detection techniques.