  Future machine to machine (M2M) communications need to support a massive
number of devices communicating with each other with little or no human
intervention. Random access techniques were originally proposed to enable M2M
multiple access, but suffer from severe congestion and access delay in an M2M
system with a large number of devices. In this paper, we propose a novel
multiple access scheme for M2M communications based on the capacity-approaching
analog fountain code to efficiently minimize the access delay and satisfy the
delay requirement for each device. This is achieved by allowing M2M devices to
transmit at the same time on the same channel in an optimal probabilistic
manner based on their individual delay requirements. Simulation results show
that the proposed scheme achieves a near optimal rate performance and at the
same time guarantees the delay requirements of the devices. We further propose
a simple random access strategy and characterized the required overhead.
Simulation results show the proposed approach significantly outperforms the
existing random access schemes currently used in long term evolution advanced
(LTE-A) standard in terms of the access delay.
