ALOHA-NOMA for Massive Machine-to-Machine IoT Communication

This paper proposes a new medium access control (MAC) protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) applications incorporating pure ALOHA with power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in which the number of transmitters are not known as a priori information and estimated with multi-hypothesis testing. The proposed protocol referred to as ALOHA-NOMA is not only scalable, energy efficient and matched to the low complexity requirements of IoT devices, but it also significantly increases the throughput. Specifically, throughput is increased to 1.27 with ALOHA-NOMA when 5 users can be separated via a SIC (Successive Interference Cancellation) receiver in comparison to the classical result of 0.18 in pure ALOHA. The results further show that there is a greater than linear increase in throughput as the number of active IoT devices increases.