Characterization of Coded Random Access with Compressive Sensing based Multi-User Detection

Abstract: The emergence of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication requires new Medium Access Control (MAC) schemes and physical (PHY) layer concepts to support a massive number of access requests. The concept of coded random access, introduced recently, greatly outperforms other random access methods and is inherently capable to take advantage of the capture effect from the PHY layer. Furthermore, at the PHY layer, compressive sensing based multi-user detection (CS-MUD) is a novel technique that exploits sparsity in multi-user detection to achieve a joint activity and data detection. In this paper, we combine coded random access with CS-MUD on the PHY layer and show very promising results for the resulting protocol.