Channel (broadcasting)

Mathematics

Base station

Algorithm

Statistics

Mathematical optimization

Engineering

Asynchronous communication

Joint (building)

Coordinate descent

Architectural engineering

Covariance

Estimation of covariance matrices

Covariance matrix

Computer science

Preamble

Real-time computing

Telecommunications

Covariance intersection

IEEE Signal Processing Letters

In this letter, we study the joint device activity and delay detection problem in asynchronous massive machine-type communications (mMTC), where all active devices asynchronously transmit their preassigned preamble sequences to the base station (BS) for device identification and delay detection. We first formulate this joint detection problem as a maximum likelihood estimation problem, which depends on the received signal only through its sample covariance, and then propose efficient coordinate descent type of algorithms to solve the formulated problem. Our proposed covariance-based approach is sharply different from the existing compressed sensing (CS) approach for the same problem. Numerical results show that our proposed covariance-based approach significantly outperforms the CS approach in terms of the detection performance since our proposed approach can make better use of the BS antennas than the CS approach.

Covariance-Based Joint Device Activity and Delay Detection in Asynchronous mMTC