Evolution of the 5G New Radio Two-Step Random Access towards 6G Unsourced MAC
<|reference_start|>Evolution of the 5G New Radio Two-Step Random Access towards 6G Unsourced MAC: This report summarizes some considerations on possible evolutions of grant-free random access in the next generation of the 3GPP wireless cellular standard. The analysis is carried out by mapping the problem to the recently-introduced unsourced multiple access channel (UMAC) setup. By doing so, the performance of existing solutions can be benchmarked with information-theoretic bounds, assessing the potential gains that can be achieved over legacy 3GPP schemes. The study focuses on the two-step random access (2SRA) protocol introduced by Release 16 of the 5G New Radio standard, investigating its applicability to support large MTC / IoT terminal populations in a grant-free fashion. The analysis shows that the existing 2SRA scheme may not succeed in providing energy-efficient support to large user populations. Modifications to the protocol are proposed that enable remarkable gains in both energy and spectral efficiency while retaining a strong resemblance to the legacy protocol.<|reference_end|>
@article{agostini2024evolution,
    title={Evolution of the 5G New Radio Two-Step Random Access towards 6G
  Unsourced MAC},
    author={Patrick Agostini, Jean-Francois Chamberland, Federico Clazzer,
  Johannes Dommel, Gianluigi Liva, Andrea Munari, Krishna Narayanan, Yury
  Polyanskiy, Slawomir Stanczak, Zoran Utkovski},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.03348},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.03348},
    primaryClass={cs.IT math.IT}
}