Practical Successive Interference Cancellation in the Binary-Input Gaussian Multiple-Access Channel

In the multiple access channel, successive interference cancellation (SIC) can be used to achieve the boundary points of the capacity region. In this paper, we investigate the practical potential of SIC by employing a set of practical moderate-blocksize Low-Density Parity-Check codes in the Multiple Access additive white Gaussian noise channel; in particular we consider binary modulation. The theoretically achievable points in the capacity region are compared with the practically achievable operating points at a low bit-error rate. It is shown that SIC makes available a higher transmission rate compared with simple separate detection that treats the signal of the other user as noise. This statement is also true for the use of binary modulation and a practical efficient implementation with channel codes of moderate blocksize.