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With the adoption of 5G wireless technology and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networking, there is a growing interest in serving a dense population of low-complexity devices over shared wireless uplink channels. Different from the traditional scenario of persistent users, in these new networks each user is expected to generate only small bundles of information intermittently. The highly dynamic nature of such demand and the typically low-complexity nature of the user devices calls for a new MAC paradigm that is geared for low-overhead and distributed operation of dynamic users.In this work, we address this need by developing a generic MAC mechanism for estimating the number and coordinating the activation of dynamic users for efficient utilization of the time-frequency resources with minimal public feedback from the common receiver. We fully characterize the throughput and delay performance of our design under a basic threshold-based multi-channel capacity condition, which allows for the use of different channel utilization schemes. Moreover, we consider the Successive-Interference-Cancellation (SIC) Multi-Channel MAC scheme as a specific choice in order to demonstrate the performance of our design for a spectrally-efficient (albeit idealized) scheme. Under the SIC encoding/decoding scheme, we prove that our low-overhead distributed MAC can support maximum throughput, which establishes the efficiency of our design. Under SIC, we also demonstrate how the basic threshold-based success model can be relaxed to be adapted to the performance of a non-ideal success model.