5G wireless networks are expected to support new services with stringent requirements on data rates, latency and reliability. One novel feature is the ability to serve a dense crowd of devices, calling for radically new ways of accessing the network. This is the case in machine-type communications, but also in urban environments and hotspots. In those use cases, the high number of devices and the relatively short channel coherence interval do not allow per-device allocation of orthogonal pilot sequences. This article motivates the need for random access by the devices to pilot sequences used for channel estimation, and shows that Massive MIMO is a main enabler to achieve fast access with high data rates, and delay-tolerant access with different data rate levels. Three pilot access protocols along with data transmission protocols are described, fulfilling different requirements of 5G services.
@article{arxiv.1606.02080,
title = {Random Access Protocols for Massive MIMO},
author = {Elisabeth de Carvalho and Emil Björnson and Jesper H. Sørensen and Petar Popovski and Erik G. Larsson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.02080},
year = {2017}
}