Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems aim to expand the coverage area of wireless networks by replacing a single highperformance Access Point (AP) with multiple small, distributed APs connected to a Central Processing Unit (CPU) through a fronthaul. Another novel wireless approach, known as the unsourced random access (URA) paradigm, enables a large number of devices to communicate concurrently on the uplink. This article considers a quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel paired to a scalable cell-free system, wherein a small number of receive antennas in the distributed APs serve devices equipped with a single antenna each. The goal of the study is to extend previous URA results to more realistic channels by examining the performance of a scalable cell-free system. To achieve this goal, we propose a coding scheme that adapts the URA paradigm to various cell-free scenarios. Empirical evidence suggests that using a cell-free architecture can improve the performance of a URA system, especially when taking into account large-scale attenuation and fading.

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This article considers the massive MIMO unsourced random access problem on a quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel. Given a fixed message length and a prescribed number of channel uses, the objective is to construct a coding scheme that minimizes the energy-per-bit subject to a fixed probability of error. The proposed scheme differs from other state-of-the-art schemes in that it blends activity detection, single-user coding, pilot-aided and temporary decisions-aided iterative channel estimation and decoding, minimum-mean squared error (MMSE) estimation, and successive interference cancellation (SIC). We show that an appropriate combination of these ideas can substantially outperform state-of-the-art coding schemes when the number of active users is more than 100, making this the best performing scheme known for this regime.

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