Massive MIMO systems, where the base stations are equipped with hundreds of
antennas, are an attractive way to handle the rapid growth of data traffic. As
the number of users increases, the initial access and handover in contemporary
networks will be flooded by user collisions. In this work, we propose a random
access procedure that resolves collisions and also performs timing, channel,
and power estimation by simply utilizing the large number of antennas
envisioned in massive MIMO systems and the inherent timing misalignments of
uplink signals during network access and handover. Numerical results are used
to validate the performance of the proposed solution under different settings.
It turns out that the proposed solution can detect all collisions with a
probability higher than 90%, at the same time providing reliable timing and
channel estimates. Moreover, numerical results demonstrate that it is robust to
overloaded situations.Comment: submitted to IEEE Globecom 2016, Washington, DC US
