A Coupled Compressive Sensing Scheme for Unsourced Multiple Access

This article introduces a novel paradigm for the unsourced multiple-access communication problem. This divide-and-conquer approach leverages recent advances in compressive sensing and forward error correction to produce a computationally efficient algorithm. Within the proposed framework, every active device first partitions its data into several subblocks, and subsequently adds redundancy using a systematic linear block code. Compressive sensing techniques are then employed to recover sub-blocks, and the original messages are obtained by connecting pieces together using a low-complexity tree-based algorithm. Numerical results suggest that the proposed scheme outperforms other existing practical coding schemes. Measured performance lies approximately 4.3 dB away from the Polyanskiy achievability limit, which is obtained in the absence of complexity constraints.