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Massive Machine Type Communications

Shruti Mittal, Nilesh Mittal

Abstract
Massive Connectivity deals with a large number of Internet of Things implementing devices(generally greater than 1 million)
connected to a single cell. This project focuses on such massive communication problems, where there a large number of devices
connected to a single base station, consisting of a given number of antennas, of which a maximum of a certain fraction of the
total devices are assumed to be active at all times owing to the sporadic nature of traffic in any coherence interval. The main study
is to identify the activity of the devices and jointly estimate the channels in use, followed by a performance analysis of activity
detection and channel estimation by essentially measuring the probability of false alarm and missed detection. This is implemented
by using a two-phase access scheme, where in the first phase is associated with activity detection and channel estimation and the
second phase is associated with the actual data transmission. The extremely large number of possible devices is reflected in the
asymptotic implementation of the algorithms used in the project. Further, with large number of possible devices and a constrained
coherence interval, it is not practical to have the pilot sequences orthogonal to each other, and thus must be non-orthogonal.
However, even with the non-orthogonality of these pilot sequences, the compressed sensing technique, considering the sporadic
nature of the activity pattern, makes the probabilities of false alarms and missed detection negligible in the asymptotic regime.

I. I NTRODUCTION

W ITH the advancements in cellular networks majorly based on Internet-of-Things(IoT) and Machine-to-Machine com-
munications, also known as, machine type communications(MTC), the need to optimize massive connectivity becomes
of primary interest. Massive connectivity captures the current scenario of wireless communications where there are a large
number of potential devices (generally of the order of 104 to 106 ) connected to a single base station, of which, however, only
a particular fraction of devices are active at any given time. This emerges from the fact that most of the devices these days
conserve power in the sleep mode until triggered and hence are not active. This sporadic nature of activity of devices is an
integral characteristic of IoT and MTC implementing devices.
In this project, we assume a single Base Station(BS) to have M antennas with a possible N number of potential devices,
of which K devices are assumed to be active in any coherence interval of T units. A coherence interval of T units is divided
into two segments, the first being of L units and the second of (T − L) units. These two segments demonstrate the two-phase
access scheme used to implement the idea of activity detection, channel estimation and data transmission. The first L units
in each coherence interval are used to detect the activity of the potential devices and to estimate the channels of the active
devices. The remaining (T − L) units are used to transmit the data bits.
As is expected for an appreciable achievable data rate, M should be of the same order as K. However, the number of
potential devices could be extremely large, and hence K would be extremely large, thus implying that M should also be large
enough. Also, for an accurate channel estimation, we would expect L > K. However, as mentioned above, K is expected
to be large whereas L is constrained by the coherence interval, that is, L < T . This necessarily implies that the devices
cannot possibly assigned orthogonal pilot sequences. The devices are hence assigned randomly-generated non-orthogonal pilot
sequences.
The main objective thus becomes analysing the performance of activity detection and channel estimation when these randomly
generated non-orthogonal pilot sequences are assigned to the active devices, and to scrutinize its impact on the achievable data
rate. We implement compressed sensing in coherence with the non-orthogonal using the AMP algorithm.
As per the prior work done along these lines, the conventional cellular networks used time and frequency slots, Time
Division Multiplexing and Frequency Division Multiplexing, respectively, that were assigned to each of the active users. The
drawback with this was the overhead that came along with it. To battle this, the contention-based allocation of slots was put
into implementation. The idea was for the active users to choose an orthogonal signature pilot sequence and send a message
to the BS, where the connection was only established if the chosen preamble was not already in use by some other user.
The drawback associated with this random access contention-based protocol was that the collision in the case of massive
connectivity was unavoidable. This finally led to the concept of grant-free non-orthogonal pilot sequences, where the active
users sent non-orthogonal pilot sequences to BS, where at the BS activity detection, channel estimation and data decoding
took place in a single phase. The sparsity in activity pattern enabled the implementation of compressed-sensing which made
activity detection and channel estimation using non-orthogonal pilot sequences practically possible.
All the previous work on grant-free non-orthogonal pilot sequences, however, lacked any method of quantitatively analyzing
the performance and accuracy of activity detection and channel estimation. In this project, we used the AMP algorithm for
M. Shell was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332 USA e-mail: (see
http://www.michaelshell.org/contact.html).
J. Doe and J. Doe are with Anonymous University.
Manuscript received April 19, 2005; revised August 26, 2015.
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the joint activity detection and channel estimation, which further is used to quantitatively compute the probability of missed
detection and probability of false alarm which gives the performance the of applied algorithm.
Conventionally, the study has been carried out under the assumption that the number of users is essentially smaller than
the number of antennas in the base station, however, here we extend the algorithms to their asymptotic regime, where the
number of users can go to inifinity, thus making the number of active users, K appreciably large, with the probability of error
in activity detection being finite.

A. Main Implementation
The main idea implemented so far is that the active users send their non-orthogonal pilot sequences to the BS, where at the
BS, in the first phase of each coherent interval, activity detection and channel detection takes place, whereas in the second
phase of each coherent interval, the actual data transmission takes place. The use of AMP Algorithm is employed for activity
detection and channel estimation. An asymptotic assumption is employed to quantitatively analyze the performance of the
AMP algorithm in activity detection by measuring the probability of missed detection and the probability of false alarm, by
assuming that the number of potential users, the number of active users and the number of antennas on the BS, all tend to
infinity.
The next section discusses the system model for the main implementation.

II. S YSTEM M ODEL

Let us assume a single cell base station consisting of M antennas and a set of N potential devices, belonging to the set
N ={1,2,3...N}, with each device having a single antenna. Of these potential devices, we assume that only K are active at any
given instant of time. We further take T to be the coherence interval, of which the first phase(associated with activity detection
and channel estimation) corresponds to the first L units and the second phase(data transmission) corresponds to the remaining
(T − L) units.
The complex channel uplink vector from the nth user, where n ∈ {1,2,3...N} is denoted by hn , where hn ∈ C M ×1 . hn is
further defined as a function of the path-loss and shadowing component, βn and the Rayleigh fading component, gn , that is,
p
hn = βn gn , ∀n (1)
where,
gn ∈ CN (0, I) (2)
and thus,
hn ∈ CN (0, βn N ). (3)
βn is assumed to be known at the BS ∀n.
The sporadic nature of the activity pattern is implemented in the following manner: All the potential users are assumed to be
synchronised in time such that the users decide at the start of every coherence interval whether to be active with a probability
of  ∈ (0, 1), or to be inactive with the probability of 1 − . The activity of the nth user is defined by an activity identifier,
(
1, if user n is active
αn = (4)
0, otherwise.
We further define the set of active users in each coherent interval as :

κ = {n : αn = 1} (5)
where, K denotes the number of active users. The overall channel input-output relationship is denoted by:
N
X
y= hn αn xn + z (6)
1

where, xn ∈ C is the user transmitted signal, y ∈CM ×1 is the channel output at the BS and z ∈CM ×1 is the additive white
Gaussian Noise (AWGN).
Assuming that all devices transmit at constant power ρ,
2
E| xn | = ρ (7)
As discussed above, we assume that pilot sequences are generated randomly, i.e., each user n is assigned a unique pilot
sequence,
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T
an = [an1 , an2 , an3 ...anL ] (8)
whose entries are generated from i.i.d. complex Gaussian distribution with zero mean and variance 1/L,
 
1
anl ∼ CN 0, (9)
L
such that,
2
|| an || = 1 (10)
Note that, the pilot sequences of all users are known by the BS.

A. Device Activity Detection and Channel Estimation as a Compressed Sensing Problem

Let ρpilot denote the identical
√ transmit power of the active users in the first transmission phase. The transmit signal of the
user n can be expressed as αn ζan , where

ζ = Lρpilot (11)
denotes the total transmit energy of each active user in the first phase.
We denote the received signal at the BS by:
p XN
Y = ζ αn an hn T + Z (12)
1

where, Y ∈ C L×M is the matrix of received signals across M antennas over L symbols, and Z = [z1 , ..., zM ] with
zm ∼ CN (0, σ 2 I).
Let,
A = [a1 , ..., aN ] (13)
and xn = αn hn
T
X = [x1 , ..., xN ] (14)
Thus, we can write (12) as
p
Y = ζAX + Z (15)
where the rows of X follow Bernoulli Gaussian Distribution.
Applying the Vector AMP Algorithm to this setup : The ultimate objective of the AMP Algorithm is to minimize the
mean-squared error(MSE) :

M SE = EXY || X̂(Y ) − X ||2 (16)

The algorithm is based on an approximation of the message passing algorithm for solving the above problem. Starting with
X0 = 0 and R0 = Y , the general form of the vector AMP algorithm proceeds at each iteration as :

xt+1
n = ηt,n ((Rt )H an + xtn ) (17)
where,
N 0
N t X ηt,n ((Rt )H an + xtn )
Rt+1 = Y − AX t+1 + R (18)
L n=1
N
T T
where t = 0, 1, ... is the index of the iteration, X t = [xt1 , ..., xtN ] is the estimate of X at iteration t, and Rt = [r1t , ..., rL
t
]
L×M
∈C denotes the corresponding residual. The ηt,n denotes the denoiser function defined by :
ηt,n : C M ×1 → C M ×1 (19)
Let the asymptotic regime imply L, K, N → ∞, while their ratios converge to some fixed positive values N/L → ω and
K/N →  withω,  ∈ (0, ∞), while keeping the total transmit power fixed at ζ.
Now, let β ∼ pβ , define a random vector Xβ ∈ C M ×1 with a distribution (1)δ0 + phβ ,where phβ denotes the distribution
hβ ∈ CN (0, βI).Let V ∈ C M ×1 ∼ CN (0, I) be independent of Xβ . The state evolution can be given by:
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σ2 1 1 H
Σt+1 = I + ωE[(ηt,β (Xβ + Σt2 V ) − Xβ )(ηt,β (Xβ + Σt2 V ) − Xβ ) ] (20)
ζ
where,

σ2
Σ0 = I + ωE[Xβ XβH ] (21)
ζ
Implementing the denoiser:

ηt,n (x̂t,n ) = E[Xn |X̂t,n = x̂t,n ] (22)

that is,
−1
ηt,n (x̂t,n ) = φt,n βn (βn I + Σt ) x̂t,n (23)
where,
1
φt,n = 1− (24)
1+  exp(−M (t,n −ψt,n ))
−1 −1
x̂H
t,n (Σt − (βn I + Σt ) )x̂t,n
t,n = (25)
M

log(det((βn Σ−1
t + I))
ψt,n = (26)
M

III. C ONCLUSION
The conclusion goes here.

A PPENDIX A
P ROOF OF THE F IRST Z ONKLAR E QUATION
Appendix one text goes here.

A PPENDIX B
Appendix two text goes here.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank...

R EFERENCES
[1] H. Kopka and P. W. Daly, A Guide to LATEX, 3rd ed. Harlow, England: Addison-Wesley, 1999.

Michael Shell Biography text here.

PLACE
PHOTO
HERE

John Doe Biography text here.

Jane Doe Biography text here.