Abstract: In order to solve the problem of active user equipment detection and channel estimation in massive machine-type communications(mMTC)uplink transmission,a distributed multiple measurement vector subspace pursuit(DMMV-SP)algorithm was proposed in this paper. Firstly,a grant-free massive random access scheme was adopted to reduce the latency and signal overhead of mMTC. Secondly,considering the multi-carrier transmission scheme and combining the subspace pursuit algorithm,the structural sparsity of the receiving antennas and sub-carriers were utilized for the active user equipment detection and channel estimation simultaneously. Finally,the active user equipment detection and channel estimation performance were evaluated by calculating the error probability and the mean square error. The simulation results show that the proposed DMMV-SP algorithm can achieve better results than the traditional orthogonal matching pursuit(OMP)algorithm.