Multicluster-Coordination Industrial Internet of Things: The Era of Nonorthogonal Transmission

The imminent industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) aims to provide massive device connectivity and support ever-increasing data demands, putting today's production environment on the edge of a new era of innovations and changes. In a multicluster IIoT, devices may suffer severe intercluster interference due to the intensive frequency reuse among adjacent access points (APs), thus deteriorating their quality of service (QoS). To address this issue, conventional multicluster coordination in the IIoT provides orthogonal code-, frequency-, time- or spatial-domain multiple access for interference management, but this results in a waste of resources, especially in the context of the explosively increased number of devices.