A Power and Spectrum Efficient Uplink Transmission Scheme for QoS-Constrained IoT Networks

Abstract—Non-orthogonal multiplexing (NOM) is a novel superposition coding inspired scheme that has been recently proposed for improving the power, spectrum efficiency and delay of wireless links with packet error rate (PER) constraints. Despite its efficiency, restricting the number of multiplexed packets to two limits the throughput improvement to 100%. Therefore, this work presents a novel NOM design with unlimited number of multiplexed packets by manipulating the repeated transmissions in automatic repeat request (ARQ) to enhance the power and spectrum efficiency by multiplexing new and repeated packets while taking into account the channel conditions and varying the power per packet in different transmissions. The proposed scheme employs an efficient heuristic algorithm to perform the power assignment and multiplexing decisions. Moreover, the complexity of the proposed NOM can be controlled by enforcing a limit on the maximum number of multiplexed packets per transmission, making it suitable for different types of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes with various computational capabilities. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed scheme, which offers up to 200% spectral efficiency improvement at moderate signal to noise ratios (SNRs), and up to 700% at high SNRs. Furthermore, the new scheme can reduce the transmission power consumption by up to 6 dB in the high SNR region.