A novel uplink data transmission scheme for small packets in massive MIMO system

Intelligent terminals often produce a large number of data packets of small lengths. For these packets, it is inefficient to follow the conventional medium access control (MAC) protocols because they lead to poor utilization of service resources. We propose a novel multiple access scheme that targets massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems based on compressive sensing (CS). We employ block precoding in the time domain to enable the simultaneous transmissions of many users, which could be even more than the number of receive antennas at the base station. We develop a block-sparse system model and adopt the block orthogonal matching pursuit (BOMP) algorithm to recover the transmitted signals. Conditions for data recovery guarantees are identified and numerical results demonstrate that our scheme is efficient for uplink small packet transmission.