  A massive MIMO system, represented by a base station with hundreds of
antennas, is capable of spatially multiplexing many devices and thus naturally
suited to serve dense crowds of wireless devices in emerging applications, such
as machine-type communications. Crowd scenarios pose new challenges in the
pilot-based acquisition of channel state information and call for pilot access
protocols that match the intermittent pattern of device activity. A joint pilot
assignment and data transmission protocol based on random access is proposed in
this paper for the uplink of a massive MIMO system. The protocol relies on the
averaging across multiple transmission slots of the pilot collision events that
result from the random access process. We derive new uplink sum rate
expressions that take pilot collisions, intermittent device activity, and
interference into account. Simplified bounds are obtained and used to optimize
the device activation probability and pilot length. A performance analysis
indicates how performance scales as a function of the number of antennas and
the transmission slot duration.
