  Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF mMIMO) provides good
interference management by coordinating many more access points (APs) than user
equipments (UEs). It becomes challenging to determine which APs should serve
which UEs with which pilots when the number of UEs approximates the number of
APs and far exceeds the number of pilots. Compared to the previous work, a
better compromise between spectral efficiency (SE) and implementation
simplicity is needed in such massive access scenarios. This paper proposes an
interference-aware massive access (IAMA) scheme realizing joint AP-UE
association and pilot assignment for CF mMIMO by exploiting the large-scale
interference features. We propose an interference-aware reward as a novel
performance metric and use it to develop two iterative algorithms to optimize
the association and pilot assignment. The numerical results show a prominent
advantage of our IAMA scheme over the benchmark schemes in terms of the user
fairness and the average SE.
