Massive Beam-Division Multiple Access for B5G Cellular Internet of Things

In this article, we investigate the issue of massive access in a beyond fifth-generation (B5G) cellular Internet of Things (IoT) network. To reduce the overhead of channel state information acquisition and the complexity of transceiver design, an integrated framework of massive beam-division multiple access (BDMA) is proposed according to the characteristics of beamspace propagation. Then, we analyze the performance of the proposed massive BDMA scheme and derive a closed-form expression for the weighted sum rate in terms of channel conditions and system parameters. To improve the overall performance, we propose a massive access algorithm by jointly optimizing transmit power and receive vector. It is found that the optimal receive vector for each IoT device is the base beam corresponding to the arrival of angle of the IoT device’s signal in the beamspace, which significantly simplifies the design of the receiver. Considering the constraint of radio-frequency (RF) chains in practical networks, we propose a clustering-based massive access algorithm, which allocates an RF chain for a cluster. Finally, extensive simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithms can provide small overhead and low complexity massive access schemes for B5G cellular IoT.