  Intelligent terminals often produce a large number of data packets of small
lengths. For these packets, it is inefficient to follow the conventional medium
access control (MAC) protocols because they lead to poor utilization of service
resources. We propose a novel multiple access scheme that targets massive
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems based on compressive sensing
(CS). We employ block precoding in the time domain to enable the simultaneous
transmissions of many users, which could be even more than the number of
receive antennas at the base station. We develop a block-sparse system model
and adopt the block orthogonal matching pursuit (BOMP) algorithm to recover the
transmitted signals. Conditions for data recovery guarantees are identified and
numerical results demonstrate that our scheme is efficient for uplink small
packet transmission.
