Paper on Massive Grant-Free Transmission in Cell-Free Systems accepted at IEEE SPAWC'23!
Stay tuned for the preprint!
Cell-free communication has the potential to significantly improve grant-free transmission in massive machine-type communication (mMTC), wherein multiple access points jointly serve a large number of user equipments (UEs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework for joint active user detection (AUD), channel estimation (CE), and data detection (DD) for massive grant-free transmission in cell-free systems. We formulate an optimization problem for joint AUD, CE, and DD by considering both the sparsity of the data matrix, which arises from intermittent user activity, and the sparsity of the effective channel matrix, which arises from intermittent user activity and large-scale fading. We approximately solve this optimization problem with forward-backward splitting, and we demonstrate its effectiveness through simulations.
The paper has been co-authored by Gangle Sun and Prof. Christoph Studer and will be presented at the IEEE 24th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC) in Shanghai in September 2023. You can find a preprint of the paper on external page arXiv.