Pilot-Based Unsourced Random Access With a Massive MIMO Receiver, Interference Cancellation, and Power Control

We consider the unsourced random access problem on a Rayleigh block-fading AWGN channel with multiple receive antennas. Specifically, we treat the slow fading scenario where the coherence blocklength is large compared to the number of active users and a message can be transmitted in a single fading coherence block. Unsourced random access refers to a form of grant-free random access where users are constrained to use the same codebook and therefore are a priori indistinguishable. The receiver must recover the list of transmitted messages up to permutations. In this paper, we propose an approach based on splitting the user messages into two parts. First, a small block of bits selects a relatively short codeword from a common “pilot” codebook. Then the remaining message bits are encoded by a standard block code for the Gaussian channel. The receiver makes use of a multiple measurement vector approximate message passing (MMV-AMP) algorithm to estimate the active user channels from the “pilot” part, and then uses the estimated channels to perform coherent maximum ratio combining (MRC) to decode the second part. We provide an accurate closed-form approximated analysis of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we analyze the MRC decoding when successive interference cancellation is performed over groups of users, striking an attractive tradeoff between complexity and performance. Finally, we investigate the impact of power control policies, taking into account the unique nature of massive random access. As a byproduct, we also present an extension of the MMV-AMP algorithm which allows pathloss coefficients to be treated as deterministic unknowns by performing maximum likelihood estimation in each step of the MMV-AMP algorithm.