Joint activity and data detection for machine to machine communication via Bayes Risk optimization

Performing joint detection of activity and data is a promising approach to reduce management overhead in Machine-to-Machine communication. However, erroneous activity detection has severe impacts on the system performance. Estimating an active node or user erroneously to be inactive results in a loss of data. To optimally balance activity and data detection, we derive a novel joint activity and data detector that bases on the minimization of the Bayes Risk. The Bayes Risk detector allows to control error rates with respect to the activity detection dynamically by a parameter that can be controlled by higher layers. In this paper we derive the Bayes Risk detector for a general linear system and present exemplary results for a specific Machine-to-Machine communication scenario.