Wireless connectivity has become a ubiquitous part of our everyday life. Owing to its very nature, the wireless channel is a shared medium, where simultaneous transmissions from neighboring transceivers operating in the same frequency can interfere with each other. Access to the shared wireless medium needs then to be strictly regulated to ensure efficient utilization of the scarce spectral resources. The admission control process to handle the access of multiple coexisting transmitters over the same wireless channel is typically initiated relying on random access‐related policies, having users send information (control or data packets) in an uncoordinated fashion. The design goal for random access techniques differs in different systems, mainly depending on the catered service. The current fourth‐generation long‐term evolution system is primarily designed to serve cellular broadband users, and hence its random access procedures have been designed to support contention from a limited number of users, with the aim to negotiate and exclusively allocate channel resources to them. Conversely, emerging fifth‐generation new radio is designed to allow the coexistence of multiservice communication. Similarly, systems that are exclusively designed to support machine‐type communication targeting Internet of Things applications, such as SigFox, LoRA, and NB‐IoT, have designed their random access mechanism to serve a large number of low power, low‐cost devices with small payload and intermittent transmissions. On the other hand, indoor wireless local area networks like Wi‐Fi are designed for a decentralized access of several users. Finally, random access techniques like nonorthogonal multiple access and grant‐free transmissions have emerged to support machine‐type communication encompassing both its massive and critical aspects, in line with the increasing importance of such critical services in emerging systems.