Lightweight and Instant Access Technologies and Protocols to Boost Digital Transformations

The further integration of telecommunications and industry has been considerable and is expected to bring significant benefits to society and economics. It also leads to some evolution trends for next-generation communication systems, including further rises in machine-type communications (MTC), uplink-dominated systems, and decentralized structures. However, the existing access protocols are not friendly to these trends. This paper analyzes the problems of existing access protocols and provides novel access technologies to solve them. These technologies include contention-based NOMA, data features, enhanced pilot design and successive interference cancellation (SIC) of diversity. With these key enablers, lightweight and instant access can be realized, and some potential modifications of protocols are analyzed. Finally, this paper uses massive and critical scenarios in digital transformations to show the great necessity of introducing novel access technologies into future communication protocols.