ML-Based Preamble Collision Detection in the Random Access Procedure of Cellular IoT Networks

Abstract: Preamble collision in the random access channel (RACH) is a major bottleneck in massive machine-type communication (mMTC) scenarios, typical of cellular IoT (CIoT) deployments. This work proposes a machine learning-based mechanism for early collision detection during the random access (RA) procedure. A labeled dataset was generated using the RA procedure messages exchanged between the users and the base station under realistic channel conditions, simulated in MATLAB. We evaluate nine classic classifiers -- including tree ensembles, support vector machines, and neural networks -- across four communication scenarios, varying both channel characteristics (e.g., Doppler spread, multipath) and the cell coverage radius, to emulate realistic propagation, mobility, and spatial conditions. The neural network outperformed all other models, achieving over 98\% balanced accuracy in the in-distribution evaluation (train and test drawn from the same dataset) and sustaining 95\% under out-of-distribution evaluation (train/test from different datasets). To enable deployment on typical base station hardware, we apply post-training quantization. Full integer quantization reduced inference time from 2500 ms to as low as 0.3 ms with negligible accuracy loss. The proposed solution combines high detection accuracy with low-latency inference, making it suitable for scalable, real-time CIoT applications found in real networks.