Order-Optimal Multiple-Access Channel for Massive MIMO via Group Testing Decoding

The number of wireless devices continues to grow, and more antennas per device are added, increasing the challenge of efficient resource allocation, especially for uplink streams. To address this, we propose a novel massive multiple-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) scheme based on Group Testing (GT) with non-cooperative self-scheduling users, reducing the required overhead and complexity. Specifically, we show that out of a population of
N
devices with
M
messages each, it is possible for the base station (BS) to jointly identify and decode up to
K
devices, unknown in advance, simultaneously without the BS applying any scheduling algorithm or collecting channel state information. The BS efficiently decodes the transmissions with vanishing error probability using only
O
(
K
log
NM
) antennas, which implies order–optimal number of antennas.