SARA: Sparse code multiple access-applied random access for IoT devices

In this paper, we study a random access (RA) procedure to support the massive connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, also known as the IoT connectivity. Compared with the previous RA procedures that have limitations to support the IoT connectivity due to the exponentially increased access delay, we develop an RA procedure by applying the sparse code multiple access to reduce the access delay and increase the ratio of the IoT devices that successfully complete their RA procedures. We provide the theoretical performance analysis of the proposed RA procedure with the performance metrics, such as the RA success probability, the average access delay, the RA throughput, and the average number of preamble transmissions. Then, we provide the numerical results to evaluate the performance of the proposed RA procedure based on our analysis and the ns-3 simulator. Numerical results show that our proposed RA procedure is able to support the massive connectivity requirement with improved RA performance metrics compared with the conventional RA procedures.