A New Look for Outage and Ergodic Improvements in Coordinated IoT Paradigms with Hybrid Multiple Access

As spectrum utilization becomes increasingly scarce due to the exponential growth of intelligent connected devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), developing efficient communication protocols with simultaneous improvements in energy and spectrum usage is critical in response to the demands of cost-effective IoT devices. In this work, we propose a hybrid orthogonal and non-orthogonal multiple-access protocol in coordinated direct uplink/downlink and relay transmission for low-cost IoT paradigms, where a source node engages in direct transmission with proximate IoT users and relies on a relay node for distant connections. This protocol offers a successive interference cancellation–free approach and does not require any channel disparity for power allocation. Exact and asymptotic analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) and ergodic capacity (EC) are derived. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed protocol significantly improves OP–by 8 folds for the respective proximate users while maintaining the same OP for distant users over classical coordinated non-orthogonal multiple access–and delivers superior EC performance for proximate IoT users at low to moderate signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and distant users at most SNR. Moreover, critical tasks for minimizing the maximal OP and maximizing the ergodic sum capacity have been undertaken to achieve outage fairness and enhance the overall system's capacity. These non-convex problems are efficiently addressed by applying the analytical asymptotic-inspired alternative optimization.