Massive Uncoordinated Access With Random User Activity

We extend the seminal work by Polyanskiy (2017) on massive uncoordinated access to the case where the number of active users is random and unknown a priori. We define a random-access code accounting for both misdetection (MD) and false alarm (FA), and derive a random-coding achievability bound for the Gaussian multiple-access channel. Our bound captures the fundamental trade-off between MD and FA probabilities. The derived bound suggests that, for the scenario considered in Polyanskiy (2017), lack of knowledge of the number of active users entails a small penalty in terms of power efficiency. For example, our bound shows that 0.5-0.7 dB extra power is required to achieve both MD and FA probabilities below 0.1 compared to the case in which the number of active users is known a priori. Taking both MD and FA into account, we show that some of the recently proposed massive random access schemes are highly suboptimal with respect to our bound.