On the Fundamental Limits of MIMO Massive Access Communication

Abstract: The multiple access channel (MAC) with many-user is a general model for massive machine type communications. In this paradigm, the number of users may be comparable or even larger than the coding blocklength $n$. In contrast, classical MAC often assumes fixed and small number of the users. In this paper, we consider the massive access channel with multiple antennas system, where the base station (BS) with multiple receiving antennas serves the users in a single cell. The magnitude of users is assumed to grow unbounded with $n$. We investigate the achievable region of MIMO massive access channel, where among the total users, an unknown subset referred to active users may transmit data periodically. The asymptotic active user identification cost is also quantified. With the theoretical analysis, it was shown that given finite number of the receiving antennas, the individual rate for each user can be formulated as the sum rate multiplied by some specific factors, which correspond to the allocation of sum capacity. The successive decoding does not apply due to the interferences from growing unbounded users. Theoretical analysis shows that successive decoding works only when the number of receiving antennas goes to infinity with the increasing codelength.