Joint Device Activity Detection, Channel Estimation and Signal Detection for Massive Grant-Free Access via BiGAMP

Massive access has been challenging for the fifth generation (5 G) and beyond since the abundance of devices causes communication overload to skyrocket. In an uplink massive access scenario, device traffic is sporadic in any given coherence time. Thus, channels across the antennas of each device exhibit correlation, which can be characterized by the row sparse channel matrix structure. In this work, we develop a bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiGAMP) algorithm based on the row sparse channel matrix structure. This algorithm can jointly detect device activities, estimate channels, and detect signals in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems by alternating updates between channel matrices and signal matrices. The signal observation provides additional information for performance improvement compared to the existing algorithms. We further analyze state evolution (SE) to measure the performance of the proposed algorithm and characterize the convergence condition for SE. Moreover, we perform theoretical analysis on the error probability of device activity detection, the mean square error of channel estimation, and the symbol error rate of signal detection. The numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-art methods in DAD-CE-SD, and the numerical results are relatively close to the theoretical analysis results.