MIMO Hybrid PD-SCMA NOMA Uplink Transceiver System

The application of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) on power domain sparse code multiple access (PD-SCMA) systems would enhance their performance by increasing the multiplexing and diversity gains. However, this is at a cost of increased detection complexity, as more users and antennas are deployed. This work develops and investigates the performance of spatial multiplexing MIMO based hybrid PD-SCMA system (M-PD-SCMA) transceiver on an uplink heterogeneous network over Rayleigh flat-fading channels. The aim is to strike a balance on the number of antennas and capacity/spectral efficiency. A low complex modified iterative joint multi-user detector employing expectation propagation algorithm (EPA) and successive interference cancellation (SIC) is proposed for the uplink system. The system capacity and outage robustness of the proposed transceiver in imperfect channels is evaluated and the bit error rate (BER) performance analysed. The link-level simulation results demonstrate that M-PD-SCMA achieves performance benchmark with PD-SCMA schemes. The proposed receiver achieves guaranteed BER performance with an increase in the number of transmit and receive antennas. Besides, the results highlight the impact of the codebook size, number of layers and power level distinctiveness on the outage bounds at each receive antenna at different SNR levels. Thus, the feasibility of an M-PD-SCMA system is validated.