A Collision Resolution Protocol for Random Access in Massive MIMO

In 5G and beyond wireless scenarios, it is expected to support tremendous amount of communicating machines. With an exponential increase of machine-to-machine (M2M) system deployments, efficient approaches to massive access by a large number of devices are to be studied. In this paper, we propose a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) based grant-free random access (RA) with resolution of preamble collision for massive access. Based on the channel hardening and favorable propagation characteristics of massive MIMO, collided signals processed at the base station (BS) can be viewed as a variation of superposition modulation, and are to be recovered by successive interference cancellation (SIC) techniques. Besides, taking into consideration the effect of pass loss and fractional power control (FPC), analytic expressions of success probability of the proposed collision resolution with conjugate beamforming (CB) and zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) are derived. With simulation results, we verify the analyses and show that the proposed protocol can resolve most preamble collisions.