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Transactions on Vehicular Technology
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Successive Interference Cancellation for LDPC
Coded Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access
Systems
Lei Yuan, Member, IEEE, Jie Pan, Nan
Yang, Member, IEEE, Zhiguo Ding, Senior
Member, IEEE, and Jinhong Yuan, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—We design, for the first time, novel successive inter-
ference cancellation (SIC) schemes for a two-user non-orthogonal
multiple access (NOMA) system using low-density parity-check
(LDPC) codes. We first develop a low-complexity SIC scheme
treating interference as noise, referred to as the N-SIC scheme,
and a SIC with joint detection scheme treating the modulation
of interference signal at the near user as side information,
referred to as the J-SIC scheme. We then propose a new extrinsic
information assisted SIC scheme, referred to as the E-SIC
scheme, which exchanges the extrinsic decoding information of
the signals for two users and thus incurs an increase complexity.
With simulations, we demonstrate that the error performance
advantage of the E-SIC scheme over the N-SIC and J-SIC
schemes is more significant when the power allocated to the near
user is larger, e.g., higher than 45%. When this power becomes
smaller, e.g., less than 10%, the low-complexity N-SIC scheme
can achieve the best error performance. In addition, we have an
important finding that when the two users adopt different order
modulation, the decoding convergence speed of the E-SIC scheme
improves when the difference between the constellation sizes of
two users is larger.
Index Terms—Non-orthogonal multiple access, successive in-
terference cancellation, low-density parity-check codes.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been recog-
nized as a highly promising multiple access technique for the
fifth generation (5G) wireless networks [1, 2]. Compared to
traditional orthogonal multiple access (OMA), NOMA pro-
vides higher capacity and better energy efficiency, as well as
supports massive connectivity by enabling users utilizing the
same time and frequency resource for information conveying.
Copyright (c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be
obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org.
Manuscript received May 22, 2017; revised November 7, 2017; accepted
April 16, 2018. The work of L. Yuan and J. Pan was supported by the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2017-188).
The work of Z. Ding was supported by the UK EPSRC under grant number
EP/L025272/1 and by H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 under grant number 690750.
The review of this paper was coordinated by Dr. A. Al-Dweik. (Corresponding
author: Jie Pan.)
L. Yuan and J. Pan are with the School of Information Science and
Engineering, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, Gansu, China (e-mail:
yuanl@lzu.edu.cn; panj15@lzu.edu.cn).
N. Yang is with the Research School of Engineering, Australian National
University, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia (e-mail: nan.yang@anu.edu.au).
Z. Ding is with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineer-
ing, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK (e-mail:
Zhiguo.ding@manchester.ac.uk).
J. Yuan is with the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunica-
tions, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia (e-mail:
j.yuan@unsw.edu.au).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier xx.xxxx/TVT.2018.xxxxxxx
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1
Thus, it has recently attracted significant attention from both
academia and industry, e.g., [3, 4].
From the information-theoretical perspective, it has been
established that NOMA not only outperforms OMA by achiev-
ing a higher sum rate, but also achieves the capacity region
of a downlink broadcast channel [5]. The core idea behind
power-domain NOMA is to (i) simultaneously serve multiple
users by using superposition coding with different power
at the transmitter and (ii) cancel inter-user interference by
using successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver.
In [6], the system-level performance gain of NOMA systems
over OMA systems was investigated within macro- and micro-
cells.
Apart from superposition coding and SIC, power allocation
(PA) and user pairing are also key design problems in NOMA
since they ensure the fairness for users. Considering a typical
NOMA system which consists of a base station (BS) and two
user equipments (UEs), [7] proposed two PA algorithms to
maximize the ergodic capacity under a total power constraint
and the minimum rate requirement of the weak user. In [8],
the benefits of user pairing for NOMA were investigated.
Specifically, it showed that NOMA offers a larger sum rate
than OMA and this rate gain can be enlarged by selecting the
users whose channel conditions are more distinctive.
Under the assumption of perfect SIC, NOMA with capacity-
achieving channel coding has been shown to approach the
capacity bound of multi-user systems. However, practical wire-
less systems always use finite-length channel codes, causing
decoding failure. Indeed, the imperfect SIC introduces severe
error propagation into NOMA systems and accordingly detri-
ments the system performance. Hence, appropriate channel
codes need to be applied into NOMA to reduce the detrimental
impact of the imperfect SIC. Motivated by this, in this paper
we focus on the application of low-density parity-check (LD-
PC) codes [9] to NOMA, since LDPC codes have been chosen
as the data channel coding scheme in 5G standards [10] due
to its low encoding and decoding complexity and capacity-
achieving performance. Therefore, the study of LDPC coded
NOMA system is pivotal to meet the requirement of the
enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) scenario in 5G. We
note that LDPC codes can be decoded iteratively using the
belief propagation (BP) algorithm. This algorithm is optimal
for achieving the best error performance when the bipartite
graph does not contain any cycle [11]. Due to this, some
studies (e.g., [12, 13]) have explored the role of LDPC codes
in the Gaussian multiple-access channel (GMAC). Consid-
ering a two-user GMAC, [12] proposed near-capacity bit-
interleaved coded modulation (BICM) using amplitude phase
shift keying, based on which LDPC codes were designed and
optimized. Concentrating on the same channel, [13] derived
the achievable rate regions for two correlated binary sources
and developed iterative joint source channel decoding by using
the correlation information. Despite [12] and [13] are valued
on their own merits, they have focused on the multiple-access
channel, rather than the broadcast channel. Therefore, their
results cannot be used in the downlink of NOMA systems.
Also, the users have adopted the same modulation scheme
in [12, 13], which hinders the use of their results in practical
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scenarios where the users are very likely to adopt different
modulation schemes.
In this paper we design, for the first time, new SIC schemes
for the downlink of a two-UE NOMA system using LDPC
codes. The SIC schemes for UE-1 (i.e., the near user) include
(i) SIC which treats interference as noise, referred to as N-
SIC, (ii) SIC with joint detection which treats the modulation
of interference signal as side information, referred to as J-SIC,
and (iii) extrinsic information assisted SIC which exchanges
the extrinsic information between the decoders at UE-1, re-
ferred to as E-SIC, where the decoders decode the signals for
both UE-1 and UE-2 (i.e., the far user). In our design, we
adopt a general assumption that the two users in the system
can adopt different modulation schemes, e.g., UE-1 can use
16- or 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) while
UE-2 can use quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK). Through
simulation results, we provide several pivotal insights into the
design of LDPC coded NOMA systems. First, when the power
allocated to UE-1 is large (e.g., higher than 45%), the E-SIC
scheme approaches the error performance of the benchmark
case where UE-1 perfectly cancels the interference signal from
UE-2. Second, when this power becomes small (e.g., less than
10%), the low-complexity N-SIC scheme can be used since
it approaches the error performance of the benchmark case.
Third, the decoding convergence speed of the E-SIC scheme
becomes higher when the difference between the constellation
sizes of UE-1 and UE-2 is larger.
II. NOMA S YSTEM W ITH LDPC C ODES
additive white Gaussian noises with zero-mean and variance
σ 2 at UE-1 and UE-2, respectively.
We assume that UE-2 directly uses a decoding algorithm
to decode x2 since it is allocated a higher transmit power and
able to treat x1 as noise. Differently, UE-1 can decode x1 only
after removing x2 through SIC. We next detail the SIC process
in Section III.
III. S UCCESSIVE I NTERFERENCE C ANCELLATION
S CHEMES
Without loss of generality, we assume that UE-1 employs
16-/64-QAM modulation and UE-2 employs QPSK/16-QAM
modulation. We also assume that UE-1 and UE-2 perform
coherent detection and BP decoding. Since UE-2 does not
carry out SIC, we only consider the SIC process at UE-1 in this
section. In this process, UE-1 subtracts x2 to achieve the best
performance. We assume that UE-1 employs two decoders,
namely, decoder 1 for decoding x1 and decoder 2 for decoding
x2 . We next describe SIC schemes in the following.
A. N-SIC: SIC with Interference as Noise
In the N-SIC scheme, x1 is treated as the white Gaussian
noise. As such, this scheme is the simplest scheme. For BP
decoding, the demodulator needs to generate the channel log-
likelihood ratio (LLR) corresponding to each transmitted bit
and pass it to the decoder. The channel LLR for decoding x2 ,
L (bj |r1 ), is written as
( √ )
∑ |r1 −h1 P2 s|
2

We consider a downlink NOMA system where a BS com- S:bj (s)=0 exp − |h1 |2 P1 +σ 2
municates with two UEs. The BS and each UE are equipped L (bj |r1 ) = ln ( √ ) , (1)
∑ |r1 −h1 P2 s|
2

with a single antenna. The channel state information (CSI) is S:bj (s)=1 exp − |h |2 P +σ 2 1 1
perfectly known at both the BS and UEs. We assume UE-
1 and UE-2 as the near user and the far user from the BS, where S denotes the set of all the QPSK/16-QAM symbols
respectively. We denote hi as the channel between the √ BS for UE-2, s ∈ S, and bj is the jth bit of s. After computing
and UE-i, where i ∈ {1, 2}. Here, we define hi , ℓi fi , the channel LLR, the BP decoding algorithm is carried out to
where ℓi denotes the path-loss and fi denotes the small-scale recover x2 , as follows:
fading. In the considered system, it is reasonable to assume (l)
• Variable node update: The updated message mi,o from
|h1 |2 > |h2 |2 , indicating that the near user possesses a larger variable node i to check node o in the l-th iteration is
channel gain than the far user. Thus, the near user can use a calculated as
higher order modulation and coding scheme than the far user.
(l)
∑ (l−1)
We further denote P as the total transmit power at the BS. mi,o = Zi + mo′ ,i , (2)
Accordingly, we denote P1 = αP and P2 = (1 − α) P as the o′ ̸=o
transmit power for the near and far user, respectively, where where Zi denotes the channel LLR of the i-th coded bit
α is the PA factor. As per the rules of NOMA, the transmit and mo′ ,i denotes the message from check node o′ to
(l−1)
power of the far user needs to be larger than that of the near variable node i in the (l − 1)-th iteration. The summation
user, i.e., α < 0.5. is taken over the set of neighboring check nodes except
We assume that LDPC codes are applied in the downlink the message recipient itself.
NOMA system. In the system, the blocks of k information • Check node update: The updated message mo,i from
(l)
bits are firstly encoded by LDPC codes with the rate of check node o to variable node i in the l-th iteration is
R = k/n, to produce codewords of n bits. Then the M - calculated as
ary QAM is used to translate the encoded bits into a symbol ( (l) )
stream. The resultant symbol stream is sent ∏ mi′ ,o
√ from √ the BS to (l)
mo,i = 2tanh −1
tanh , (3)
UEs. Specifically, the BS transmits x̃ , P1 x1 + P2 x2 to ′
2
i ̸=i
UEs, where xi denotes the symbol for UE-i. The received
signals at UE-1 and UE-2 are expressed as r1 = h1 x̃ + n1 and where the product is taken over the set of neighboring
r2 = h2 x̃ + n2 , respectively, where n1 and n2 denote complex variable nodes except the message recipient itself.

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• Decoding decision: After l iterations, the LLR Zitot is
calculated as
∑ (l)
Zitot = Zi + mo,i , (4)
o
where the summation is taken over the set of neighboring
check nodes. We clarify that decoding is terminated either
when the maximum number of decoding iterations is
reached or when the decoded bits satisfy all the check
constraints of LDPC codes.
We denote the recovered x2 by x̂2 . Once it is recovered, it
is subtracted from the signal r1 for decoding x1 . The resultant
signal r̂1 is given by
(√ √ )
r̂1 = h1 P1 x1 + P2 (x2 − x̂2 ) + n1 . (5)
If all the check constraints of LDPC codes are satisfied, x̂2
is the same as x2 and thus, the interference from UE-2 can
be fully eliminated. Otherwise, decoding failure occurs and
error propagation happens. In the presence of error propa-
gation, if we assume that x2 and x̂2 are independent, the
interference from UE-2 cannot be eliminated and addition-
2
al interference x̂2 with power P2 |h1 | is introduced, i.e.,
the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) increases to
2 2
P1 |h1 | /(2P2 |h(1 | +)σ 2 ). As such, the channel LLR for
decoding x1 , L̂ b̂j |r̂1 , is written as
( √
∑ |r̂1 −h1 P1 ŝ|
2
complexity is proportional to the size of QAM constellation.
Here, a simple approach proposed in [14] can be adopted to
approximately compute the channel LLR involved in the J-SIC
scheme. After this computation, the decoding process is the
same as that of the N-SIC scheme.
C. E-SIC: Extrinsic Information Assisted SIC
We note that the aforementioned schemes may impose
an error propagation effect on the NOMA system, which is
caused by decoding failure. To tackle this, we propose a
novel E-SIC scheme to improve the decoding performance. In
the proposed scheme, the extrinsic information is exchanged
between decoder 1 and decoder 2 at UE-1, as follows: In each
iteration, x2 is firstly decoded. Then the soft outputs associated
with the variable nodes produced by decoder 2 are fed back
to decoder 1 as the a priori information. This is followed by
the decoding iterations of decoder 1. Finally, the soft outputs
associated with the variable nodes produced by decoder 1
are fed back to decoder 2 as the a priori information. This
completes one iteration.
To decode x2 , we rewrite the channel LLR given by (7) as
∑ ∑ ( )
|r1 −ψ|2
Ŝ S:bj (s)=0 Pr (ŝ) exp − σ2
L̃ (bj |r1 ) = ln ∑ ∑ ( ) , (8)
|r1 −ψ|2
Ŝ S:bj (s)=1 Pr (ŝ) exp − σ2
)

( ) Ŝ:b̂j (ŝ)=0 exp − σ2

where Pr (ŝ) denotes the probability that a symbol is selected
L̂ b̂j |r̂1 = ln ( ), (6) from the set of M -ary QAM symbols for UE-1. At the very
√
∑ |r̂1 −h1 P1 ŝ|
2
first iteration, we set Pr (ŝ) = 1/M . After running decoder 2
Ŝ:b̂j (ŝ)=1 exp − σ 2
for l iterations, we are able to compute the output extrinsic
∑ (l)
LLR as Zia = o mo,i .
where Ŝ denotes the set of all the M -ary QAM symbols for
Different from the N-SIC and J-SIC schemes, the E-SIC
UE-1, ŝ ∈ Ŝ, and b̂j is the jth bit of ŝ. We note that (6) can still
be used when error propagation happens, since the decoding
scheme does not implement the subtraction ( ) operator. Thus,
results would contain a large amount of correct information the channel LLR for decoding x1 , L̄ b̂j |r1 , is written as
about x1 . Finally, the BP decoding algorithm is implemented ∑ ∑ ( )
|r1 −ψ|2
to recover x1 . S Ŝ:bj (ŝ)=0 Pr (s) exp − σ 2

Since the N-SIC scheme treats x1 as Gaussian noise, it L̄ (bj |r1 ) = ln ∑ ∑ ( ) , (9)
|r1 −ψ|2
only needs to know the power of UE-1 and thus leads to a S Ŝ:bj (ŝ)=1 Pr (s) exp − σ 2

simple calculation of channel LLR. However, we note that where Pr (s) denotes the probability that a symbol is selected
UE-1 employs QAM symbols which do not follow Gaussian from the set of QPSK/16-QAM symbols for UE-2. The value
distribution. Therefore, this scheme incurs a decoding perfor- of Pr (s) can be calculated by using the extrinsic information
mance loss. Motivated by this, we propose the J-SIC scheme Zia which is provided by decoder 2. After running decoder 1
and present it in the next subsection. for l iterations, the output extrinsic LLR Zia are fed back to
decoder 2 as the a priori information and used to calculate
B. J-SIC: SIC with Joint Detection the a priori probability Pr (ŝ). We perform q such iterations
In this scheme, the QAM structure of x1 is treated as before making the final decision.
side information. Hence, the channel LLR for decoding x2 , We note that decoder 1 and decoder 2 run once only for
L̂ (bj |r1 ), is written as the N-SIC and J-SIC schemes. Differently, such decoders run
∑ ∑ ( ) q times in the E-SIC scheme. This indicates that the E-SIC
|r1 −ψ|2
Ŝ S:bj (s)=0 exp − σ 2
L̂ (bj |r1 ) = ln ∑ ∑ ( ), (7) scheme achieves a better decoding performance, while causing
|r1 −ψ|2 a higher decoding complexity. Specifically, the decoding com-
Ŝ S:bj (s)=1 exp − σ 2

(√ √ ) plexity of the E-SIC scheme is q times those of the N-SIC and

where ψ = h1 P1 ŝ + P2 s . In order to calculate the
channel LLR in the J-SIC scheme, both the power and the
QAM structure of x1 need to be known. Compared to the N-
SIC scheme, the J-SIC scheme improves the decoding perfor-
mance at the cost of increasing computational complexity. This
J-SIC schemes. In fact, if the BP decoder correctly decodes
x2 , the J-SIC scheme achieves the best decoding performance
without causing any performance loss. Therefore, in order to
reduce the decoding complexity of the E-SIC scheme, we
can further improve the E-SIC scheme by combining J-SIC

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0 0
10 10
BER (benchmark)
Start FER (benchmark)
−1 −1
10 BER (N-SIC) 10
FER (N-SIC)
BER (J-SIC) BER (benchmark)
−2 −2
10 10 FER (benchmark)
FER (J-SIC)

BER/FER

BER/FER
BER (N-SIC)
BER (E-SIC-1)
FER (N-SIC)
−3 FER (E-SIC-1) −3
10 10 BER (J-SIC)
BER (E-SIC-2)
FER (J-SIC)
FER (E-SIC-2) BER (E-SIC-1)
Calculate the channel −4
10 BER (E-SIC-4) 10
−4
FER (E-SIC-1)
LLR by using (8) and Yes FER (E-SIC-4) BER (E-SIC-2)
−5
BER (E-SIC-6) FER (E-SIC-2)
−5
implement BP 10 FER (E-SIC-6) 10

decoding for UE-2 −6 −6

10 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 10 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)
q MaxIter
(a) (b)
Fig. 2. Performance of UE-1 with n = 1008 and R = 0.5, and UE-2 uses
Decoding is No
QPSK. (a) BER and FER versus SNR with α = 0.4 and 16-QAM at UE-1.
successful No (b) BER and FER versus SNR with α = 0.4 and 64-QAM at UE-1.
0 0
10 10
BER (N-SIC)
FER (N-SIC)
−1 BER (J-SIC)
10
Yes q q+1 −1
10 FER (J-SIC)
Calculate the output BER (E-SIC-2)
extrinsic LLR Z ia −2
10 FER (E-SIC-2)

BER/FER

BER/FER
−2
BER (benchmark, 16-QAM) 10
−3 FER (benchmark, 16-QAM)
10
Calculate the resultant BER (N-SIC, 16-QAM)
−3
signal by using (5) −4 FER (N-SIC, 16-QAM) 10
Calculate the channel Calculate the
10
BER (benchmark, 64-QAM)
LLR by using (9) and output extrinsic −5
FER (benchmark, 64-QAM) −4
10
10
implement BP LLR Z ia
BER (N-SIC, 64-QAM)
FER (N-SIC, 64-QAM)
decoding for UE-1 −6 −5
10 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 100.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5
SNR (dB) α

Calculate the channel No (a) (b)

LLR by using (6) and
implement BP
decoding for UE-1
Decoding is
Fig. 3. Performance of UE-1 with n = 1008 and R = 0.5, and UE-2 uses
successful
QPSK. (a) BER and FER versus SNR with α = 0.3 and 16-/64-QAM at
UE-1. (b) BER and FER versus PA factor with 64-QAM at UE-1.
Yes

Output the hard
decision
Fig. 1. Flowchart of the E-SIC scheme.
with the iteration process described in this subsection. The
flowchart of our proposed E-SIC scheme is depicted in Fig. 1,
where ‘MaxIter’ denotes the maximum number of decoding
iterations. We initialize the number of iterations q to 1.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
In this section, we evaluate the performance of three SIC
schemes through Monte Carlo simulations. Without loss of
generality, the channels are set as |h1 |2 = 10 dB and |h2 |2 =
0 dB in all the figures. Moreover, the parity-check matrix of
regular LDPC codes is constructed using the progressive edge-
growth algorithm [15]. The maximum number of BP decoding
iterations is 50. In addition, both UE-1 and UE-2 adopt Gray
mapping in modulation.
For an LDPC coded NOMA system, UE-1 achieves the
best error performance if it perfectly cancels the interference
signal from UE-2. For the performance comparison, therefore,
a benchmark case is built by adopting the assumption that
the interference signal from UE-2 is perfectly cancelled. In
all the simulation results, we represent the N-SIC scheme by
“N-SIC”, the J-SIC scheme by “J-SIC”, and the E-SIC scheme
with MaxIter = X by “E-SIC-X”. Furthermore, we define the
2
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for UE-1 as SNR , P1 |h1 | /σ 2 .
In Figs. 2 and 3, both UE-1 and UE-2 adopt (3, 6)-regular
LDPC codes with code length n = 1008 and rate R = 0.5,
and UE-2 uses QPSK modulation. Fig. 2(a) plots the bit error
rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) versus SNR when UE-
1 uses 16-QAM and α = 0.4. We first observe that the J-SIC
scheme achieves a better decoding performance than the N-
SIC scheme. For example, when SNR = 10 dB, the J-SIC
scheme achieves a BER of 1.5 × 10−3 whereas the N-SIC
scheme achieves a BER of 2.5 × 10−2 . Second, we observe
a large decoding performance gap between these two SIC
schemes and the benchmark case. Third, we observe that the
E-SIC scheme outperforms the other two SIC schemes. More
importantly, the performance of the E-SIC scheme becomes
closer to that of the benchmark case when MaxIter increases.
For example, when SNR = 8 dB, the BER of the benchmark
case is 3 × 10−5 and the BER of the E-SIC scheme with
MaxIter = 6 is 8 × 10−5 .
We next examine the impact of the order of modulation
on the BER and FER performance. In Fig. 2(b), we plot the
BER and FER versus SNR when UE-1 uses 64-QAM and
α = 0.4. We find that the decoding convergence speed of
the E-SIC scheme with 64-QAM is higher than that of the
E-SIC scheme with 16-QAM. Moreover, the E-SIC scheme
with MaxIter = 2 and 64-QAM achieves almost the same
performance as the benchmark case. Given the performance
gap between the E-SIC scheme with MaxIter = 6 and 16-
QAM and the benchmark case, as indicated in Fig. 2(a),
we find that the benefit of the E-SIC scheme becomes more
obvious when the difference of constellation sizes between two
UE receivers becomes large.
Next, we examine the impact of a decreasing PA factor on
the BER and FER. Fig. 3(a) plots the BER and FER versus
SNR for α = 0.3. In this subfigure, we consider both 16-
QAM and 64-QAM at UE-1. We observe that the decoding
performance of the low-complexity N-SIC scheme for UE-1
is almost the same as that of the benchmark case, regardless

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0 0
10
−1
10
−2
10 BER (benchmark)
BER/FER
FER (benchmark)
BER (N-SIC, α = 0.2)
−3
10 FER (N-SIC, α = 0.2)
BER (J-SIC, α = 0.2)
FER (J-SIC, α = 0.2)
10
−4
BER (E-SIC-4, α = 0.2)
FER (E-SIC-4, α = 0.2)
10
−5
BER (E-SIC-6, α = 0.2)
FER (E-SIC-6, α = 0.2)
BER (N-SIC, α = 0.1)
−6
10 10
FER (N-SIC, α = 0.1)
10.5 11 11.5 12 12.5 13
SNR (dB)
(a)
Fig. 4. Performance of UE-1. (a) BER and FER versus SNR with n = 1008
and 16-QAM at UE-1 and UE-2. (b) BER and FER versus SNR with n =
1944, 64-QAM at UE-1, and QPSK at UE-2.
of the modulation adopted by UE-1. This observation is due to
the large power difference between UE-1 and UE-2. Fig. 3(b)
plots the BER and FER versus PA factor when UE-1 uses 64-
QAM and SNR = 12.5 dB. We observe from Fig. 3(b) that
when α < 0.35, the N-SIC scheme achieves almost the same
performance as the benchmark case, given that the BER and
FER in the benchmark case when UE-1 uses 64-QAM and
SNR = 12.5 dB are 8.6 × 10−5 and 1.6 × 10−3 , respectively,
as indicated in Fig. 2(b). Therefore, when α is small, the
use of the N-SIC scheme is sufficient. It follows that using
the high-complexity J-SIC scheme or the E-SIC scheme does
not provide any considerable improvement in the decoding
performance.
In order to further study the impact of the order of mod-
ulation of UE-2 on the decoding performance of UE-1, we
consider that both UE-1 and UE-2 adopt 16-QAM in Fig. 4(a).
In this figure, UE-2 still adopts (3, 6)-regular LDPC codes,
while UE-1 adopts (3, 18)-regular LDPC codes with rate
R = 5/6. We observe that when α = 0.2, the E-SIC scheme
with MaxIter = 6 still exhibits a worse performance than the
benchmark case in the regime of medium SNR. For example,
when SNR = 13 dB, the benchmark case achieves a BER of
5.7×10−6 , while the E-SIC scheme with MaxIter = 6 achieves
a BER of 5.3 × 10−3 . Only when α further decreases (e.g., α
decreases to 0.1), the performance of the N-SIC scheme for
UE-1 becomes closer to that of the benchmark case. Therefore,
by comparing Fig. 4(a) with Fig. 2(b) we find that the benefits
of three SIC schemes are more obvious for a large PA factor
(or equivalently, a higher transmit power allocated to UE-1)
and the large difference of constellation sizes between two UE
receivers.
We note that irregular quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes [16]
have been used in many practical wireless communication
standards, such as IEEE 802.16e and IEEE 802.11n. Therefore,
we now provide simulation results for the QC LDPC coded
NOMA system. In Fig. 4(b), both users adopt QC LDPC codes
used in IEEE 802.11n with code length n = 1944. UE-1
adopts 64-QAM and R = 3/4, while UE-2 adopts QPSK
and R = 0.5. Based on Figs. 2, 3, and 4, we find that the
threshold value of α which determines the best SIC scheme,
out of three SIC schemes, depends on the modulation orders
and code parameters (i.e., code rate and code length) of two
UEs. We clarify that this threshold can be found via simulation
for a given set of parameters.
0018-9545 (c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Transactions on Vehicular Technology
5
10
−1
V. C ONCLUSION
10
−2
In this paper, we proposed novel SIC schemes for an LDPC
10
coded NOMA system. Specifically, the proposed extrinsic
BER/FER
−3
10 BER (benchmark)
FER (benchmark)
BER (N-SIC, α = 0.45)
information assisted SIC scheme (i.e., the E-SIC scheme)
10
−4 FER (N-SIC, α = 0.45)
BER (J-SIC, α = 0.45) overcomes the disadvantage of the SIC with interference as
FER (J-SIC, α = 0.45)
10
−5
BER (E-SIC-2, α = 0.45)
FER (E-SIC-2, α = 0.45)
noise scheme (i.e., the N-SIC scheme) and the SIC with
BER (N-SIC, α = 0.4)
−6
1013.5
FER (N-SIC, α = 0.4) joint detection scheme (i.e., the J-SIC scheme) by combating
13.5 14 14.5 15 15.5 16 16.5 17
SNR (dB) the error propagation effect. Through simulations results,
(b) we demonstrated that the proposed E-SIC scheme achieves
a better decoding performance than the N-SIC and J-SIC
schemes when the PA factor is large (e.g., higher than 0.45).
We also showed that when the maximum number of decoding
iterations increases, the decoding performance of the proposed
E-SIC scheme approaches that of the benchmark case in which
the interference signal from UE-2 is perfectly cancelled. We
further showed that the decoding convergence speed of the
proposed E-SIC scheme is higher in the presence of larger
difference of constellation sizes between two UEs.
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