Compressive massive random access for massive machine-type communications (mMTC)

In future wireless networks, one fundamental challenge for massive machine-type communications (mMTC) lies in the reliable support of massive connectivity with low latency. Against this background, this paper proposes a compressive sensing (CS)-based massive random access scheme for mMTC by leveraging the inherent sporadic traffic, where both the active devices and their channels can be jointly estimated with low overhead. Specifically, we consider devices in the uplink massive random access adopt pseudo random pilots, which are designed under the framework of CS theory. Meanwhile, the massive random access at the base stations (BS) can be formulated as the sparse signal recovery problem by leveraging the sparse nature of active devices. Moreover, by exploiting the structured sparsity among different receiver antennas and subcarriers, we develop a distributed multiple measurement vector approximate message passing (DMMV-AMP) algorithm for further improved performance. Additionally, the state evolution (SE) of the proposed DMMV-AMP algorithm is derived to predict the performance. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme, which exhibits a good tightness with the theoretical SE.