Random Access Channel Coding in the Finite Blocklength Regime

Consider a random access communication scenario over a channel whose operation is defined for any number of possible transmitters. Inspired by the model recently introduced for the Multiple Access Channel (MAC) with a fixed, known number of transmitters by Polyanskiy, we assume that the channel is invariant to permutations on its inputs, and that all active transmitters employ identical encoders. Unlike Polyanskiy, we consider a scenario in which neither the transmitters nor the receiver know which or how many transmitters are active. We refer to this agnostic communication setup as the Random Access Channel, or RAC. Limited feedback is used to ensure that the collection of active transmitters remains fixed during each epoch. The decoder is tasked with determining from the channel output the number of active transmitters (k) and their messages but not which transmitter sent which message. The central result of this work demonstrates the achievability on a RAC of performance that is first-order optimal for the MAC in operation during each coding epoch. While prior multiple access schemes for a fixed number of transmitters require 2^k - 1 simultaneous threshold rules, the proposed scheme uses a single threshold rule and achieves the same dispersion.