On the design of universal schemes for massive uncoordinated multiple access

Future wireless access points may have to support sporadic transmissions from a massive number of unattended machines. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the design of massive uncoordinated multiple access schemes for such systems based on clever enhancements to slotted ALOHA. A close connection has been established between the design of the multiple access scheme and the design of low density generator matrix codes. Based on this connection, optimal multiple access schemes have been designed based on slotted ALOHA and successive interference cancellation, assuming that the number of users in the network is known at the transmitters. In this paper, we extend this work and consider the design of universal uncoordinated multiple access schemes that are agnostic to the number of users in the network. We design Markov chain based transmission policies and numerical results show that substantial improvement to slotted ALOHA is possible.