Cluster-Aided Collision Resolution Random Access in Distributed Massive MIMO Systems

Massive machine-type communication (MTC) is expected to be one of the key concerns in future B5G and 6G. However, the explosive growth of MTC devices (MTDs) in Internet of Things (IoT) poses great challenges for the initial access procedure. To address this issue, we propose a cluster-aided collision resolution random access (CACRRA) protocol for grant-based random access (RA) in the distributed massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) systems, which takes full advantage of the spatial multiplexing provided by distributed mMIMO. By exploiting the difference of large-scale fading coefficients between different access points (APs) and MTDs, we further propose an exclusive clustering algorithm to cluster APs for each pilot. Moreover, the pilot collision resolution is performed distributedly in each cluster by leveraging the channel hardening and the favorable propagation of mMIMO channels, which achieves a large reuse factor of pilots. Simulation results show that the proposed CACRRA can efficiently resolve the pilot collision and significantly improve the access performance. Specifically, the proposed protocol can improve the RA throughput more than nine times compared to the conventional protocol in incredibly crowded scenarios.