Success Probability of Grant-Free Random Access With Massive MIMO

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) opens up new avenues for enabling highly efficient random access (RA) by offering abundance of spatial degrees of freedom. In this paper, we investigate the grant-free RA with massive MIMO and derive the analytic expressions of success probability of the grant-free RA for conjugate beamforming and zero-forcing beamforming techniques. With the derived analytic expressions, we further shed light on the impact of system parameters on the success probability. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analyses. It is confirmed that the grant-free RA with massive MIMO is an attractive RA technique with low signaling overhead that could simultaneously accommodate a number of RA users, which is multiple times the number of RA channels, with close-to-one success probability. In addition, when the number of antennas in massive MIMO is sufficiently large, we show that the number of orthogonal preambles would dominate the success probability.