Toward Massive Connectivity for IoT in Mixed-ADC Distributed Massive MIMO

Massive connectivity is a key requirement for the Internet of Things (IoT). In practice, the network should be capable of accommodating thousands of devices and meeting their traffic demands. In this article, we consider the access phase for IoT in a mixed-analog-to-digital converter distributed massive multiple-input–multiple-output system, in which users are classified into light-load users and heavy-load users depending on their traffic load requirements. To meet the low-latency and low-cost demands in IoT, the access scheme for both types of users are designed in a grant-free fashion. For users with light-load traffic demands, by formulating the user activity detection (UAD) and channel estimation (CE) into a compressed sensing problem, we provide a low-complexity algorithm solver which requires no prior information. The simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect user activity and estimate channel state information (CSI) between the users and access points (APs). To satisfy the throughput requirements of heavy-load users, after UAD and CE, a two-step dynamic clustering is proposed for coordinated multipoint transmission using the large-scale fading (LSF) information. The impact of quantization noise on LSF estimation is investigated, as well as, a corresponding compensation method and accuracy bound. By detecting the clustering behavior among users in the first step, the complexity of the joint user and AP clustering is substantially reduced. The numerical results reveal that the proposed algorithm can offer significant performance gains in various scenarios with fast convergence.