No Arabic abstract
In the massive machine-type communication (mMTC) scenario, a large number of devices with sporadic traffic need to access the network on limited radio resources. While grant-free random access has emerged as a promising mechanism for massive access, its potential has not been fully unleashed. In particular, the common sparsity pattern in the received pilot and data signal has been ignored in most existing studies, and auxiliary information of channel decoding has not been utilized for user activity detection. This paper endeavors to develop advanced receivers in a holistic manner for joint activity detection, channel estimation, and data decoding. In particular, a turbo receiver based on the bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiG-AMP) algorithm is developed. In this receiver, all the received symbols will be utilized to jointly estimate the channel state, user activity, and soft data symbols, which effectively exploits the common sparsity pattern. Meanwhile, the extrinsic information from the channel decoder will assist the joint channel estimation and data detection. To reduce the complexity, a low-cost side information-aided receiver is also proposed, where the channel decoder provides side information to update the estimates on whether a user is active or not. Simulation results show that the turbo receiver is able to reduce the activity detection, channel estimation, and data decoding errors effectively, while the side information-aided receiver notably outperforms the conventional method with a relatively low complexity.
In this paper, we propose a turbo receiver for joint activity detection and data decoding in grant-free massive random access, which iterates between a detector and a belief propagation (BP)-based channel decoder. Specifically, responsible for user activity detection, channel estimation, and soft data symbol detection, the detector is developed based on a bilinear inference problem that exploits the common sparsity pattern in the received pilot and data signals. The bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiG-AMP) algorithm is adopted to solve the problem using probabilities of the transmitted data symbols estimated by the channel decoder as prior knowledge. In addition, extrinsic information is derived from the detector to improve the channel decoding accuracy of the decoder. Simulation results show significant improvements achieved by the proposed turbo receiver compared with conventional designs.
With recent advances on the dense low-earth orbit (LEO) constellation, LEO satellite network has become one promising solution to providing global coverage for Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. Confronted with the sporadic transmission from randomly activated IoT devices, we consider the random access (RA) mechanism, and propose a grant-free RA (GF-RA) scheme to reduce the access delay to the mobile LEO satellites. A Bernoulli-Rician message passing with expectation maximization (BR-MP-EM) algorithm is proposed for this terrestrial-satellite GF-RA system to address the user activity detection (UAD) and channel estimation (CE) problem. This BR-MP-EM algorithm is divided into two stages. In the inner iterations, the Bernoulli messages and Rician messages are updated for the joint UAD and CE problem. Based on the output of the inner iterations, the expectation maximization (EM) method is employed in the outer iterations to update the hyper-parameters related to the channel impairments. Finally, simulation results show the UAD and CE accuracy of the proposed BR-MP-EM algorithm, as well as the robustness against the channel impairments.
Millimeter-wave/Terahertz (mmW/THz) communications have shown great potential for wideband massive access in next-generation cellular internet of things (IoT) networks. To decrease the length of pilot sequences and the computational complexity in wideband massive access, this paper proposes a novel joint activity detection and channel estimation (JADCE) algorithm. Specifically, after formulating JADCE as a problem of recovering a simultaneously sparse-group and low rank matrix according to the characteristics of mmW/THz channel, we prove that jointly imposing $l_1$ norm and low rank on such a matrix can achieve a robust recovery under sufficient conditions, and verify that the number of measurements derived for the mmW/THz wideband massive access system is significantly smaller than currently known measurements bound derived for the conventional simultaneously sparse and low-rank recovery. Furthermore, we propose a multi-rank aware method by exploiting the quotient geometry of product of complex rank-$L$ matrices with the number of scattering clusters $L$. Theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm in terms of computational complexity, detection error rate, and channel estimation accuracy.
For massive machine-type communications, centralized control may incur a prohibitively high overhead. Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) provides possible solutions, yet poses new challenges for efficient receiver design. In this paper, we develop a joint user identification, channel estimation, and signal detection (JUICESD) algorithm. We divide the whole detection scheme into two modules: slot-wise multi-user detection (SMD) and combined signal and channel estimation (CSCE). SMD is designed to decouple the transmissions of different users by leveraging the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms, and CSCE is designed to deal with the nonlinear coupling of activity state, channel coefficient and transmit signal of each user separately. To address the problem that the exact calculation of the messages exchanged within CSCE and between the two modules is complicated due to phase ambiguity issues, this paper proposes a rotationally invariant Gaussian mixture (RIGM) model, and develops an efficient JUICESD-RIGM algorithm. JUICESD-RIGM achieves a performance close to JUICESD with a much lower complexity. Capitalizing on the feature of RIGM, we further analyze the performance of JUICESD-RIGM with state evolution techniques. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve a significant performance improvement over the existing alternatives, and the derived state evolution method predicts the system performance accurately.
Massive machine-type communication (mMTC) has been regarded as one of the most important use scenarios in the fifth generation (5G) and beyond wireless networks, which demands scalable access for a large number of devices. While grant-free random access has emerged as a promising mechanism for massive access, its potential has not been fully unleashed. Particularly, the two key tasks in massive access systems, namely, user activity detection and data detection, were handled separately in most existing studies, which ignored the common sparsity pattern in the received pilot and data signal. Moreover, error detection and correction in the payload data provide additional mechanisms for performance improvement. In this paper, we propose a data-assisted activity detection framework, which aims at supporting more active users by reducing the activity detection error, consisting of false alarm and missed detection errors. Specifically, after an initial activity detection step based on the pilot symbols, the false alarm users are filtered by applying energy detection for the data symbols; once data symbols of some active users have been successfully decoded, their effect in activity detection will be resolved via successive pilot interference cancellation, which reduces the missed detection error. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm effectively increases the activity detection accuracy, and it is able to support $sim 20%$ more active users compared to a conventional method in some sample scenarios.