Precise Analysis of Covariance Identifiability for Activity Detection in Grant-Free Random Access

We consider the identifiability issue of maximum likelihood based activity detection in massive MIMO based grant-free random access. A prior work by Chen et al. indicates that the identifiability undergoes a phase transition for commonly-used random signatures. In this paper, we provide an analytical characterization of the boundary of the phase transition curve. Our theoretical results agree well with the numerical experiments.