Massive Access for Future Wireless Communication Systems

Multiple access technology played an important role in wireless communication in the last decades: it increases the capacity of the channel and allows different users to access the system simultaneously. However, the conventional multiple access technology, as originally designed for current human-centric wireless networks, is not scalable for future machine-centric wireless networks. Massive access (studied in the literature under such names as "massive- device multiple access," "unsourced massive random access," "massive connectivity," "massive machine-type communication," and "many-access channels") exhibits a clean break with current networks by potentially supporting millions of devices in each cellular network. The tremendous growth in the number of connected devices requires a fundamental rethinking of the conventional multiple access technologies in favor of new schemes suited…