Massive Multiple Access Based on Superposition Raptor Codes for Cellular M2M Communications

Machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless systems aim to provide ubiquitous connectivity between machine-type communication (MTC) devices without any human intervention. Given the exponential growth of MTC traffic, it is of utmost importance to ensure that future wireless standards are capable of handling this traffic. In this paper, we focus on the design of a very efficient massive access strategy for highly dense cellular networks with M2M communications. Several MTC devices are allowed to simultaneously transmit in the same resource block by incorporating Raptor codes and a simple modulation scheme. This significantly reduces the access delay and improves the achievable system throughput. A simple yet efficient random access strategy is proposed to not only detect the selected preambles, but also estimate the number of devices which have chosen them. No device identification is needed in the random access phase which significantly reduces the signaling overhead. The proposed scheme is analyzed and the maximum number of MTC devices that can be supported in a resource block is characterized as a function of the message length, number of available resources, and the number of preambles. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively support a massive number of MTC devices for a limited number of available resources, when the message size is small.