Sparse Activity Detection for Massive Connectivity

This paper considers the massive connectivity application in which a large number of devices communicate with a base-station (BS) in a sporadic fashion. Device activity detection and channel estimation are central problems in such a scenario. Due to the large number of potential devices, the devices need to be assigned non-orthogonal signature sequences. The main objective of this paper is to show that by using random signature sequences and by exploiting sparsity in the user activity pattern, the joint user detection and channel estimation problem can be formulated as a compressed sensing single measurement vector (SMV) or multiple measurement vector (MMV) problem depending on whether the BS has a single antenna or multiple antennas and efficiently solved using an approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm. This paper proposes an AMP algorithm design that exploits the statistics of the wireless channel and provides an analytical characterization of the probabilities of false alarm and missed detection via state evolution. We consider two cases depending on whether or not the large-scale component of the channel fading is known at the BS and design the minimum mean squared error denoiser for AMP according to the channel statistics. Simulation results demonstrate the substantial advantage of exploiting the channel statistics in AMP design; however, knowing the large-scale fading component does not appear to offer tangible benefits. For the multiple-antenna case, we employ two different AMP algorithms, namely the AMP with vector denoiser and the parallel AMP-MMV, and quantify the benefit of deploying multiple antennas.