  Recently, the paradigm of massive ultra-reliable low-latency IoT
communications (URLLC-IoT) has gained growing interest. Reliable delay-critical
uplink transmission in IoT is a challenging task since low-complex devices
typically do not support multiple antennas or demanding signal processing
tasks. However, in many IoT services the data volumes are small and deployments
may include massive number of devices. We consider on a clustered uplink
transmission with two cooperation approaches: First, we focus on scenario where
location-based channel knowledge map (CKM) is applied to enable cooperation.
Second, we consider a scenario where scarce channel side-information is applied
in transmission. In both scenarios we also model and analyse the impact of
erroneous information. In the performance evaluation we apply the recently
introduced data-oriented approach that has gathered significant attention in
the context of short-packet transmissions. Specifically, it introduces a
transient performance metric for small data transmissions, where the amount of
data and available bandwidth play crucial roles. Results show that cooperation
between clustered IoT devices may provide notable benefits in terms of
increased range. It is noticed that the performance is heavily depending on the
strength of the static channel component in the CKM based cooperation. The
channel side-information based cooperation is robust against changes in the
radio environment but sensitive to possible errors in the channel
side-information. Even with large IoT device clusters, side-information errors
may set a limit for the use of services assuming high-reliability and
low-latency. Analytic results are verified against simulations, showing only
minor differences at low probability levels.
