I-Talk: Reliable and Practical Superimposed Signal Decoding Without Power Control

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is emerging, while the spectrum is at a premium. To enhance spectrum efficiency, a promising solution is Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) that enables users to communicate with the same resource at the same time, while decoding the superimposed signal at the receiver. Existing NOMA technologies, however, rely on strict power control to decode the superimposed signal, infeasible for heterogeneous and low-cost IoT devices. In contrast, we propose I-Talk, a new NOMA scheme that is designed for IoT and can decode the superimposed signals from two transmitters without power control. Importantly, considering the IoT systems in the wild, both the hardware imperfections and mobility are unavoidable, which can cause severe signal variations, resulting in an unreliable decoding performance. To solve this problem, we design a synthesis channel coefficient to track all signal offsets caused by the hardware imperfection. Meanwhile, we propose a diversity transmission and smart combining scheme to achieve high reliable decoding performance. To demonstrate the feasibility of this new NOMA approach in practical systems, we implement I-Talk with USRP devices and the experimental results illustrate that I-Talk achieves a one-order lower bit-error-rate and a 1.47x higher throughput gain than the state-of-the-art superimposed signal decoding scheme.