Multi-Stage Decoding in Dense Distributed Networks for MTC

Dense distributed networks have been proposed to fulfil the wireless connectivity demands in the 5th generation (5 G) and beyond. In this paper, a multi-stage decoding (MSD) scheme is proposed to enhance access connectivity for machine-type communication (MTC) in dense distributed networks. Different from the conventional single-stage decoding (SSD) scheme that performs local decoding at each access point (AP) independently, the MSD scheme exploits the local decoding information exchange between the APs and a central processing unit (CPU) to resolve access collisions and enhance access capacity with successive interference cancellation (SIC). To show the performance superiority of MSD to SSD, we analytically evaluate and compare the error probabilities of both the schemes by leveraging on techniques from stochastic geometry. Simulation results verify our analysis and indicate that the MSD scheme is able to effectively reduce the error probability and afford much higher access load compared to the SSD scheme, which makes it more suitable for massive MTC.