Massive Uncoordinated Access with Random User Activity

Paper i proceeding, 2021

We extend the seminal work by Polyanskiy (2017) on massive uncoordinated access to the case where the number of active users is random and unknown a priori. We define a random-access code accounting for both misdetection (MD) and false-alarm (FA), and derive a random-coding achievability bound for the Gaussian multiple access channel. Our bound captures the fundamental trade-off between MD and FA probabilities. It suggests that lack of knowledge of the number of active users entails a small penalty in power efficiency. For a typical scenario, to achieve both MD and FA probabilities below 0.1, the required energy per bit predicted by our bound is 0.5-0.7 dB higher than that predicted by the bound in Polyanskiy (2017) for a known number of active users. Taking both MD and FA into account, we use our bound to benchmark the energy efficiency of some recently proposed massive random access schemes.