Massive Grant-Free Access With Massive MIMO and Spatially Coupled Replicas

Abstract

Massive multiple access schemes, capable of serving a large number of uncoordinated devices while fulfilling reliability and latency constraints, are proposed. The schemes belong to the class of grant-free coded random access protocols and are tailored to massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) base station processing. High reliability is obtained owing to an intra-frame spatial coupling effect, triggered by a simple device access protocol combined with acknowledgements (ACKs) from the base station. To provide system design guidelines, analytical bounds on error floor and latency are also derived. The proposed schemes are particularly interesting to address the challenges of massive machine-type communications in the framework of next generation massive multiple access systems.