Multiple Preambles for High Success Rate of Grant-Free Random Access with Massive MIMO

Grant-free random access (RA) with massive MIMO is a promising RA technique with low signaling overhead that provides significant benefits in increasing the channel reuse efficiency. Since user equipment (UE) detection and channel estimation in grant-free RA rely solely on the received preambles, preamble designs that enable high success rate of UE detection and channel estimation are very much in need to ensure the performance gain of grant-free RA with massive MIMO. In this paper, a super preamble consisting of multiple consecutive preambles is proposed for high success rate of grant-free RA with massive MIMO. With the proposed approach, the success of UE detection and channel estimation for a RA UE depends on two conditions: 1) it is a solvable UE; 2) its super preamble is detected. Accordingly, we theoretically analyze the solvable rate of RA UEs with multiple preambles and propose a reliable UE detection algorithm to obtain the super preambles of RA UEs by exploiting the quasi-orthogonality characteristic of massive MIMO. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that turning a preamble into a super preamble consisting of two or three shorter preambles, the success rate of UE detection and channel estimation could be significantly increased using the proposed approach.