Grant-free Massive Random Access with Retransmission: Receiver Optimization and Performance Analysis

There is an increasing demand of massive machine-type communication (mMTC) to provide scalable access for a large number of devices, which has prompted extensive investigation on grant-free massive random access (RA) in 5G and beyond wireless networks. Although many efficient signal processing algorithms have been developed, the limited radio resource for pilot transmission in grant-free massive RA systems makes accurate user activity detection and channel estimation challenging, which thereby compromises the communication reliability. In this paper, we adopt retransmission as a means to improve the quality of service (QoS) for grant-free massive RA. Specifically, by jointly leveraging the user activity correlation between adjacent transmission blocks and the historical channel estimation results, we first develop an activity-correlation-aware receiver for grant-free massive RA systems with retransmission based on the correlated approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm. Then, we analyze the performance of the proposed receiver, including the user activity detection, channel estimation, and data error, by resorting to the state evolution of the correlated AMP algorithm and the random matrix theory (RMT). Our analysis admits a tight closed-form approximation for frame error rate (FER) evaluation. Simulation results corroborate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed receiver for grant-free massive RA with retransmission, compared with a conventional design that disregards the critical user activity correlation.