Stochastic Geometry Design for Cell-Free Coded Random Access

Grant-free access schemes, capable to reduce control signaling and device complexity, are good candidates to support future massive multiple access applications. In the same direction, cell-free architectures promise to pave the way to fairness in power consumption and performance among the users. The combination of these two ingredients has the potential to interconnect a large number of low-power devices to the network. In this letter, a theoretical analysis tool for grant-free coded random access, based on stochastic geometry and density evolution, is developed in the context of cell-free architectures. In sharp contrast with the cell-based scenario, we found out that temporally repeating less packets is a valid option due to the exploitation of spatial repetitions given by the cell-free topology.