Compressive coded random access for massive MTC traffic in 5G systems

Massive MTC support is an important future market segment, but not yet efficiently supported in cellular systems. In this paper we follow-up on recent concepts combining advanced MAC protocols with Compressed Sensing (CS) based multiuser detection. Specifically, we introduce a concept for sparse joint activity, channel and data detection in the context of the Coded ALOHA (FDMA) protocol. We will argue that a simple sparse activity and data detection is not sufficient (as many papers do) because control resources are in the order of the data. In addition, we will improve on the performance of such protocols in terms of the reduction of resources required for the user activity, channel estimation and data detection. We will mathematically analyze the system accordingly and provide expressions for the capture probabilities of the underlying sparse multiuser detector. Finally, we will provide CS algorithms for the joint estimation scheme and evaluate its performance.