Sparsity-Exploiting Blind Receiver Algorithms for Unsourced Multiple Access in MIMO and Massive MIMO Channels.

We propose new transmission schemes and receiver algorithms for unsourced multiple access (UMA) in MIMO and massive MIMO channels. Each active transmitter’s information bits are first channel encoded. The coded bits are divided into sub-blocks and each sub-block is modulated and transmitted. For both MIMO and massive MIMO channels, the conventional nonlinear modulation can be employed where each sub-block of coded bits is mapped to a transmitted signal vector. For the massive MIMO channel, we propose a new hybrid modulation scheme to reduce the receiver complexity, where the first sub-block is nonlinearly modulated, and the subsequent sub-blocks are linearly modulated and spread by the first sub-block signal. We also propose sparsity-exploiting blind receiver algorithms. Specifically, for the MIMO case, we exploit the codeword sparsity inherent in the UMA system, and a channel clustering technique, to estimate the channel and the transmitted signal of each transmitter. For the massive MIMO, in addition to the codeword sparsity, we further exploit the channel sparsity and user sparsity in estimating the channel and transmitted signal of each transmitter. The proposed receiver algorithms for both MIMO and massive MIMO channels output either hard or soft estimates of the coded bits, and therefore single-user channel decoding of the information bits can be performed for each transmitter. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performances of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]