Grant-free multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) usually employs non-orthogonal pilots for joint user detection and channel estimation. However, existing methods are too complex for massive grant-free access in massive MIMO. This letter proposes pilot detection reference signal (PDRS) to greatly reduce the complexity. In PDRS scheme, no iteration is required. Direct weight estimation is also proposed to calculate combining weights without channel estimation. After combining, PDRS recovery errors are used to decide the pilot activity. The simulation results show that the proposed grant-free scheme performs good with a complexity reduced by orders of magnitude.
Grant-free random access (RA) with massive MIMO is a promising RA technique for massive access with low signaling overhead. In the grant-free RA with massive MIMO, preamble length has a critical impact on the performance of the system. In this paper, the optimal preamble length is investigated to maximize spectral efficiency (SE) of the grant-free RA with massive MIMO, where effects of the preamble length on the preamble collision and preamble overhead as well as channel estimation accuracy are taken into account. Simulation results agree well with our analyses and confirm the existence of opt…
Massive access is one of the main use cases of beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks and massive MIMO is a key technology for supporting it. Prior works studied massive access in the co-located massive MIMO framework. In this paper, we investigate the activity detection in grant-free random access for massive machine type communications (mMTC) in cell-free massive MIMO network. Each active device transmits a pre-assigned non-orthogonal pilot sequence to the APs and the APs send the received signals to a central processing unit (CPU) for joint activity detection. We formulate the maximum likelihood…
Future wireless networks need to support massive machine type communication (mMTC) where a massive number of devices accesses the network and massive MIMO is a promising enabling technology. Massive access schemes have been studied for co-located massive MIMO arrays. In this paper, we investigate the activity detection in grant-free random access for mMTC in cell-free massive MIMO networks using distributed arrays. Each active device transmits a non-orthogonal pilot sequence to the access points (APs) and the APs send the received signals to a central processing unit (CPU) for joint activity d…
Massive MIMO opens up new avenues for enabling highly efficient random access (RA) by offering abundance of spatial degrees of freedom. In this paper, we investigate the grant-free RA with massive MIMO and derive the analytic expressions of success probability of the grant-free RA for conjugate beamforming and zero-forcing beamforming techniques.With the derived analytic expressions, we further shed light on the impact of system parameters on the success probability. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analyses. It is confirmed that the grant-free RA with massive MIMO is an attractiv…
The design of highly scalable multiple access schemes is a main challenge in the evolution towards future massive machine-type communications, where reliability and latency constraints must be ensured to a large number of uncoordinated devices. In this scenario, coded random access (CRA) schemes, where successive interference cancellation algorithms allow large improvements with respect to classical random access protocols, have recently attracted an increasing interest. Impressive performance can be potentially obtained by combining CRA with massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO). In t…
This paper investigates joint channel estimation and device activity detection in the LEO satellite-enabled grant-free random access systems with large differential delay and Doppler shift. In addition, the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) with orthogonal time-frequency space modulation (OTFS) is utilized to combat the dynamics of the terrestrial-satellite link. To simplify the computation process, we estimate the channel tensor in parallel along the delay dimension. Then, the deep learning and expectation-maximization approach are integrated into the generalized approximate message passi…
5G cellular networks are designed to support a new range of applications not supported by previous standards. Among these, ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) applications are arguably the most challenging. URLLC service requires the user equipment (UE) to be able to transmit its data under strict latency constraints with high reliability. To address these requirements, new technologies, such as mini-slots, semi-persistent scheduling and grant-free access were introduced in 5G standards. In this work, we formulate a spatiotemporal mathematical model to evaluate the user-plane late…
Grant-free random access (RA) with massive MIMO is a promising RA technique with low signaling overhead that provides significant benefits in increasing the channel reuse efficiency. Since user equipment (UE) detection and channel estimation in grant-free RA rely solely on the received preambles, preamble designs that enable high success rate of UE detection and channel estimation are very much in need to ensure the performance gain of grant-free RA with massive MIMO. In this paper, a super preamble consisting of multiple consecutive preambles is proposed for high success rate of grant-free RA…
A high success rate of grant-free random access scheme is proposed to support massive access for machine-to-machine communications in massive multipleinput multiple-output systems. This scheme allows active user equipments (UEs) to transmit their modulated uplink messages along with super pilots consisting of multiple sub-pilots to a base station (BS). Then, the BS performs channel state information (CSI) estimation and uplink message decoding by utilizing a proposed graph combined clustering independent component analysis (GCICA) decoding algorithm, and then employs the estimated CSIs to dete…
In this paper, a data-driven approach is proposed to jointly design the common sensing (measurement) matrix and jointly support recovery method for complex signals, using a standard deep auto-encoder for real numbers. The auto-encoder in the proposed approach includes an encoder that mimics the noisy linear measurement process for jointly sparse signals with a common sensing matrix, and a decoder that approximately performs jointly sparse support recovery based on the empirical covariance matrix of noisy linear measurements. The proposed approach can effectively utilize the feature of common s…
Grant-free massive access is an important technique for supporting massive machine-type communications (mMTC) for Internet-of-Things (IoT). Two important features in grant-free massive access are low-complexity devices and short-packet data transmission, making the traditional performance metric, achievable rate, unsuitable in this case. In this letter, we investigate grant-free massive access in a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. We consider random access control, and adopt approximate message passing (AMP) for user activity detection and channel estimation in the pilot t…
In this paper, we study grant-free random access with massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. We first show that the performance of massive MIMO based grant-free random access is mainly decided by the probability of preamble collision. The implication of this is that although the number of antennas can be arbitrarily large, the (average) number of successful packet transmissions can be limited by the number of preambles. Then, we propose an approach to preamble collision reduction without increasing the number of preambles using the notion of superpositioned preambles (S-preambl…
To support machine-type communication (MTC), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been considered for grant-free random access. In general, the performance of grant-free random access with massive MIMO is limited by the number of preambles and the number of active devices. In particular, when there are a number of active devices transmitting data packets simultaneously, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) cannot be high enough for successful decoding. In this paper, in order to improve performance, we consider immediate re-transmissions for an active device that has…
The optimal design of the energy-efficient multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) aided uplink ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) system is an important but unsolved problem. For such a system, we propose a novel absorbing-Markov-chain-based analysis framework to shed light on the puzzling relationship between the delay and reliability, as well as to quantify the system energy efficiency. We derive the transition probabilities of the absorbing Markov chain considering the Rayleigh fading, the channel estimation error, the zero-forcing multi-user-detection (ZF-MUD), the grant-free…
A key challenge of massive MTC (mMTC), is the joint detection of device activity and decoding of data. The sparse characteristics of mMTC makes compressed sensing (CS) approaches a promising solution to the device detection problem. However, utilizing CS-based approaches for device detection along with channel estimation, and using the acquired estimates for coherent data transmission is suboptimal, especially when the goal is to convey only a few bits of data. First, we focus on the coherent transmission and demonstrate that it is possible to obtain more accurate channel state information by …
The number of wireless devices is drastically increasing, resulting in many devices contending for radio resources. In this work, we present an algorithm to detect active devices for unsourced random access, i.e., the devices are uncoordinated. The devices use a unique, but non-orthogonal preamble, known to the network, prior to sending the payload data. They do not employ any carrier sensing technique and blindly transmit the preamble and data. To detect the active users, we exploit partial channel state information (CSI), which could have been obtained through a previous channel estimate. Fo…
Support massive connectivity is an important requirement in 5G wireless communication system. For massive Machine Type Communication (MTC) scenario, since the network is expected to accommodate a massive number of MTC devices with sparse short message, the multiple access scheme like current LTE uplink would not be suitable. In order to reduce the signaling overhead, we consider an grant-free multiple access system, which requires the receiver facilitate activity detection, channel estimation, and data decoding in "one shot" and without the knowledge of active user's pilots. However, most of t…
We consider the problem of unsourced random access (U-RA), a grant-free uncoordinated form of random access, in a wireless channel with a massive MIMO base station equipped with a large number $M$ of antennas and a large number of wireless single-antenna devices (users). We consider a block fading channel model where the $M$-dimensional channel vector of each user remains constant over a coherence block containing $L$ signal dimensions in time-frequency. In the considered setting, the number of potential users $K_\text{tot}$ is much larger than $L$ but at each time slot only $K_a \ll K_\text{t…
This paper considers the joint channel estimation and device activity detection in the grant-free random access systems, where a large number of Internet-of-Things devices intend to communicate with a low-earth orbit satellite in a sporadic way. In addition, the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) with orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation is adopted to combat the dynamics of the terrestrial-satellite link. We first analyze the input-output relationship of the single-input single-output OTFS when the large delay and Doppler shift both exist, and then extend it to the gran…
Grant-free access schemes are candidates to support future massive multiple access applications owing to their capability to reduce control signaling and latency. As a promising class of grant-free schemes, coded random access schemes can achieve high reliabilities also with uncoordinated transmissions and therefore in presence packet collisions. In this paper, an analysis tool for coded random access, based on density evolution, is proposed and exploited for system design and optimization. In sharp contrast with the existing literature, where such tools have been developed under simplified ch…
We develop a new algorithm for activity detection for grant-free multiple access in distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). The algorithm is a distributed version of the approximate message passing (AMP) based on a soft combination of likelihood ratios computed independently at multiple access points. The underpinning theoretical basis of our algorithm is a new observation that we made about the state evolution in the AMP. Specifically, with a minimum mean-square error denoiser, the state maintains a block-diagonal structure whenever the covariance matrices of the signals have such …
We investigate the feasibility of using Massive MIMO to support URLLC in both coherence interval based and 3GPP compliant pilot settings. We consider grant-free uplink transmission with MMSE receiver and adopt 3GPP channel models. In the coherence interval based pilot setting, by extensive system level simulations, we find that using a Massive MIMO base station with 128 antennas and MMSE receiver, URLLC requirements can be achieved in Urban Macro (UMa) Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) with orthogonal pilots and Neyman-Pearson detector. However, in the 3GPP compliant pilot setting, even by using the co…
Many real-world scenarios for massive machine-type communication involve sensors monitoring a physical phenomenon. As a consequence, the activity pattern of these sensors will be correlated. In this letter, we study how the correlation of user activities can be exploited to improve detection performance in grant-free random access systems where the users transmit pilot-hopping sequences and the detection is performed based on the received energy. We show that we can expect considerable performance gains by adding regularizers, which take the activity correlation into account, to the non-negati…
Massive machine-type communication (MTC) is expected to play a key role in supporting Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as smart cities, smart factory, and connected vehicles through cellular networks. MTC is characterized by a large number of MTC devices and their sparse activities, which are difficult to be supported by conventional approaches and motivate the design of new access technologies. In particular, in the 5th generation (5G), grant-free or 2-step random access schemes are introduced for MTC to be more efficient by reducing signaling overhead. In this article, we first int…
This paper studies the user scheduling problem in a multiuser multiple-input multi-output (MIMO) status update system, in which multiple single-antenna devices aim to send their latest statuses to a multiple-antenna information-fusion access point (AP) via a shared wireless channel. The information freshness in the considered system is quantified by a recently proposed metric, termed age of information (AoI). Thanks to the extra spatial degrees-of-freedom brought about by the multiple antennas at the AP, multiple devices can be granted to transmit simultaneously in each time slot. We aim to se…
A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a nearly-passive flat layer made of inexpensive elements that can add a tunable phase shift to the impinging electromagnetic wave and are controlled by a low-power electronic circuit. This paper considers the fundamental problem of target detection in a RIS-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. At first, a general signal model is introduced, which includes the possibility of using up to two RISs (one close to the radar transmitter and one close to the radar receiver) and subsumes both a monostatic and a bistatic radar configuration wit…
In a cell-free massive MIMO architecture a very large number of distributed access points simultaneously and jointly serves a much smaller number of mobile stations; a variant of the cell-free technique is the user-centric approach, wherein each access point just serves a reduced set of mobile stations. This paper introduces and analyzes the cell-free and user-centric architectures at millimeter wave frequencies, considering a training-based channel estimation phase, and the downlink and uplink data transmission phases. First of all, a multiuser clustered millimeter wave channel model is intro…
This work presents a novel framework for random access in crowded scenarios of multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO) systems. A multi-antenna base station (BS) and multiple single-antenna users are considered in these systems. A huge portion of the system resources is dedicated as orthogonal pilots for accurate channel estimation which imposes a huge training overhead. This overhead can be highly mitigated by exploiting intrinsic angular domain sparsity of massive MIMO channels and the sporadic traffic of users, i.e., few number of users are active to sent or receive data in each coherence inte…
Future cellular networks will support a massive number of devices as a result of emerging technologies such as Internet-of-Things and sensor networks. Enhanced by machine type communication (MTC), low-power low-complex devices in the order of billions are projected to receive service from cellular networks. Contrary to traditional networks which are designed to handle human driven traffic, future networks must cope with MTC based systems that exhibit sparse traffic properties, operate with small packets and contain a large number of devices. Such a system requires smarter control signaling sch…
Grant-free non-coherent index-modulation (NC-IM) has been recently considered as an efficient massive access scheme for enabling cost- and energy-limited Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that transmit small data packets. This paper investigates the grant-free NC-IM scheme combined with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing for applicant to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based massive IoT access. Specifically, each device is assigned a unique non-orthogonal signature sequence codebook. Each active device transmits one of its signature sequences in the given time-frequency resources, by modu…
In this paper, we study how to efficiently and reliably detect active devices and estimate their channels in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system to enable massive machine-type communications (mMTC). First, by exploiting the correlation of the channel frequency responses in narrow-band mMTC, we propose a block-wise linear channel model. Specifically, the continuous OFDM subcarriers in the narrow-band are divided into several sub-blocks and a linear function with only two variables…
The next wave of wireless technologies will proliferate in connecting sensors, machines, and robots for myriad new applications, thereby creating the fabric for the Internet of Things (IoT). A generic scenario for IoT connectivity involves a massive number of machine-type connections. But in a typical application, only a small (unknown) subset of devices are active at any given instant, thus one of the key challenges for providing massive IoT connectivity is to detect the active devices first and then to decode their data with low latency. This article outlines several key signal processing te…
In this work we treat the unsourced random access problem on a Rayleigh block-fading AWGN channel with multiple receive antennas. Specifically, we consider the slowly fading scenario where the coherence block-length is large compared to the number of active users and the message can be transmitted in one coherence block. Unsourced random access refers to a form of grant-free random access where users are considered to be a-priori indistinguishable and the receiver recovers a list of transmitted messages up to permutation. In this work we show that, when the coherence block length is large enou…
This paper investigates the massive random access for a huge amount of user devices served by a base station (BS) equipped with a massive number of antennas. We consider a grant-free unsourced random access (U-RA) scheme where all users possess the same codebook and the BS aims at declaring a list of transmitted codewords and recovering the messages sent by active users. Most of the existing works concentrate on applying U-RA in the oversimplified independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channels. In this paper, we consider a fairly general joint-correlated MIMO channel model with line…
The core requirement of massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC) is to support reliable and fast access for an enormous number of machine-type devices (MTDs). In many practical applications, the base station (BS) only concerns the list of received messages instead of the source information, introducing the emerging concept of unsourced random access (URA). Although some massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) URA schemes have been proposed recently, the unique propagation properties of millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems are not fully exploited in conventional URA schemes. In …
This two-part paper considers an uplink massive device communication scenario in which a large number of devices are connected to a base-station (BS), but user traffic is sporadic so that in any given coherence interval, only a subset of users are active. The objective is to quantify the cost of active user detection and channel estimation and to characterize the overall achievable rate of a grant-free two-phase access scheme in which device activity detection and channel estimation are performed jointly using pilot sequences in the first phase and data is transmitted in the second phase. In o…
In this work, based on the hybrid generalized approximate message passing (HyGAMP) algorithm, we propose the message-scheduling GAMP (MSGAMP) algorithm in order to address the problem of joint active device detection and channel estimation in an uplink grant-free massive MIMO system scenario. In MSGAMP, we apply three different scheduling techniques based on the Residual Belief Propagation (RBP) in which messages are generated using the latest available information. With a much lower computational cost than the state-of-the-art algorithms, MSGAMP-type schemes exhibits good performance in terms…
In this work we treat the unsourced random access problem on a Rayleigh block-fading AWGN channel with multiple receive antennas. Specifically, we consider the slowly fading scenario where the coherence block-length is large compared to the number of active users and the message can be transmitted in one coherence block. Unsourced random access refers to a form of grant-free random access where users are considered to be a-priori indistinguishable and the receiver recovers a list of transmitted messages up to permutation. In this work we show that, when the coherence block length is large enou…
In this paper, we study the problem of user activity detection and large-scale fading coefficient estimation in a random access wireless uplink with a massive MIMO base station with a large number $M$ of antennas and a large number of wireless single-antenna devices (users). We consider a block fading channel model where the $M$-dimensional channel vector of each user remains constant over a coherence block containing $L$ signal dimensions in time-frequency. In the considered setting, the number of potential users $K_\text{tot}$ is much larger than $L$ but at each time slot only $K_a<<K_\text{…
Multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are a prime candidate for use in massive connection density in machine-type communication (MTC) networks. One of the key challenges of MTC networks is to obtain accurate channel state information (CSI) at the access point (AP) so that the spectral efficiency can be improved by enabling enhanced MIMO techniques. However, current communication mechanisms relying upon frequency division duplexing (FDD) might not fully support an enormous number of devices due to the rate-constrained limited feedback and the time-consuming scheduling architec…
