Non-Orthogonal Modulation for Short Packets in Massive Machine Type Communications

Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) enables novel applications but its dense deployment and short packet properties lead to new challenges for physical layer design. This paper investigates hyper-dimensional modulation (HDM), a recently proposed novel non-orthogonal modulation, for short packet communications with superior interference tolerance in mMTC. We propose a new tree-based K-best decoding algorithm for HDM to improve the packet error rate performance in both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and interference-limited scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve 0.5 - 4 dB gain in AWGN and interference-limited channels compared to the Polar code with CRC (cyclic redundancy check)-aided list decoding.