Multiuser Detection Algorithm for PDMA Uplink
System Based on SIC and MMSE
Dan Kong1 , Jie Zeng2 , Xin Su2 , Liping Rong2 and Xibin Xu2
1
Broadband Wireless Access Laboratory,
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications
2
Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology,
Research Institute of Information Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Email: zengjie@tsinghua.edu.cn
Abstract—As the promising novel multiple access scheme for
the 5th generation (5G) wireless communication system, pattern
division multiple access (PDMA) technology can improve the
spectral efficiency and support the massive connection based
on the reasonable unequal diversity between users. Compared
with traditional multiple access technologies, PDMA brings more
serious multiple address interference to hinder the multiuser
detection. The universal detection algorithm with low complexity
and high performance is one of the main challenges of PDMA
technology. In this paper, we proposed a new iterative detec-
tion and decoding algorithm, which is a successive interference
cancellation (SIC) iterative processing based on the minimum
mean square error (MMSE) detection and channel decoding
algorithm. It is essentially a SIC iterative processing based
on some users’ information has been correctly decoded by
the MMSE detection and the channel decoder. The proposed
multiuser detection algorithm can prevent the error propagation
by the cyclic redundancy check (CRC). The simulation results
show that the proposed algorithm can get significant performance
gains over traditional multiuser detection algorithms.
Keywords—Pattern division multiple access, minimum mean
square error detection, successive interference cancellation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
It is well known that each generation of wireless com-
munication system has an innovation of multiple access tech-
nology. The multiple access technology is one of the most
important factors in the wireless communication systems. In
the 3rd generation (3G) wireless communication systems, code
division multiple access (CDMA) technology is widely used.
In the 4th generation (4G) wireless communication systems,
the researchers proposed orthogonal multiple access based on
orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and
single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA)
in downlink and uplink respectively, it enhanced the data rate
and the spectral efficiency [1].
Along with the popularization of the smart devices and the
increasing demand for the quality of experience (QoE), 5G
needs more flexible allocation schemes of orthogonal resources
[2]-[3]. In order to avoid the interference between users,
the classical orthogonal multiple access (OMA) technology
This work was supported by the China’s 863 Project (No.2015AA01A709),
the National S&T Major Project (No.2016ZX03001017), Science and Technol-
ogy Program of Beijing (No.D151100000115003), S&T Cooperation Projects
(No.2015DFT10160B), and by State Key Laboratory of Wireless Mobile Com-
munications, China Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT)
allocates the resource between users to orthogonal resources
in either time, frequency, or code domain. In the other word-
s, the OMA technology sacrifices the spectral efficiency to
reduce the interference between users. Hence, the spectral
efficiency becomes a key challenge to handle [4]. To enhance
spectral efficiency and support the connectivity of massive
devices, novel multiple access technologies are proposed. It
breaks the traditional resource allocation model in OMA. At
the transmitter side, users can be shared at the same time
or frequency resources in the same spatial layer via power
domain or code domain multiplexing. At the receiver side,
multiuser signals are separated with some advanced detection
algorithm, like successive interference cancellation (SIC) [5]
and some approximate maximum likelihood (ML) algorithms
[6]-[7]. The candidate schemes of advanced multiple access
includes bit division multiplexing (BDM), interleaved subcarri-
er index modulation OFDMA (ISIM-OFDMA), multiuser bit-
interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (MU-
BICM-ID), multiuser shared access (MUSA), non-orthogonal
multiple access (NOMA), pattern division multiple access, and
sparse code multiple access (SCMA) [8]-[9].
Pattern division multiple access, a novel multiple access
scheme, is a competitive candidate technology for 5G wireless
systems, which is based on the principle of the introduced
reasonable non-uniform diversity between multiuser to en-
hance the capacity [10]. PDMA can obtain higher multiuser
multiplexing and diversity gain by designing multiuser diver-
sity PDMA pattern matrix [11]. However, to fully acquire
these benefits, serious multiple users interference is the main
difficulty to process multiuser detection [7]. In this paper, we
propose a novel joint SIC self-adaption iterative processing
which is based on the MMSE detection and channel decoding
algorithm for PDMA uplink system. SIC iterative processing
is performed based on the results of cyclic redundancy check
(CRC), which prevents the propagation of errors and improves
the block error rate (BLER) performance of the receiver.
We name the proposed algorithm is MMSE-CRC-SIC. It can
get better performance than maximum likelihood detection
algorithm by jointing MMSE detection algorithm, the channel
decoder algorithm and SIC iterative at the receiver. It also is a
SIC iterative processing based on some users information has
been correctly decoded. And we used the log-likelihood ratio
(LLR) which is the soft information to transmit the information
of users between detection and decoder to improve the BLER
performance of the receiver.
 ^G ` ŚĂŶŶĞů ^E` WD K&D [ ZĂĚŝŽ
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In hϭ
ĞŶĐŽĚĞƌ DĂƉƉŝŶŐ DŽĚƵůĂƚŽƌ ŚĂŶŶĞů EŽŝƐĞ
section II, the system model is described. Section III presents ^G ` ^E`
the proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm for PDMA detection. hϮ
ŚĂŶŶĞů WD K&D [ ZĂĚŝŽ \
ĞŶĐŽĚĞƌ DĂƉƉŝŶŐ DŽĚƵůĂƚŽƌ ŚĂŶŶĞů
Simulation results of PDMA uplink system and analysis are
presented in section IV, and section V concludes this paper. ^G `1 ŚĂŶŶĞů ^E`1 WD K&D [1 ZĂĚŝŽ
hE
ĞŶĐŽĚĞƌ DĂƉƉŝŶŐ DŽĚƵůĂƚŽƌ ŚĂŶŶĞů

Notation: We use lowercase and uppercase boldface letters

for column vectors and matrices respectively. We use the (·)T ,
(·)H and (·)−1 denote the transpose, conjugate transpose and
inversion of a matrix respectively. The K × K identity matrix
is denoted by IK . The 0 denotes the zero vector. And  stands
for the product of the corresponding position elements of two
matrices.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
We consider PDMA uplink system with K users communi-
cating with a base station (BS) and spreading over N orthog-
onal resources. Each user is equipped with a single antenna,
and the BS is equipped with two antennas. The PDMA is
a non-orthogonal multiple access technology. It can support
more users shared in the same orthogonal resources to obtain
higher spectrum efficiency. So the overloading factor defined
as α = K/N is usually larger than one. At the transmitter side
as shown in Fig.1, for each user k, k = 1, 2, ..., K, the binary
information bit denoted by {d}k = (d0 , ...., dnum ), num
is the length of the user’s information bits. For each user’s
information bits are encoded by channel encoder with coding
rate Rk , the encoded bits are denoted by {b}k . The coding
rate Rk = L/num, L is the length of the user’s encoded
bits. These encoded bits are modulated to a sequence of
L/log2 M coded symbols xk by M-dimensional modulation.
According to the basic principle of PDMA [12], the user’s
symbols are mapped to the corresponding resource by PDMA
pattern matrix HPDMA . PDMA pattern matrix is composed of
0 and 1. 0 denotes that user can not use the corresponding
resource block, 1 denotes that user can use the corresponding
resource block. The line and column of HPDMA represent users
and resource blocks respectively. And it is designed with the
following principles:
• The different columns should have reasonable range
of diversity.
• The number of overlapping users in the each line
should be more likely to be equal.
So the maximum number of supported users with N or-
thogonal resource block can be calculated by
     
N N N [
= 2N − 1
+ + ... + (1)
Fig. 1. PDMA uplink system with K users sharing on N orthogonal resources.
(N,K)
y = Hch HP DM A xK + w
(3)
= H(N,K) xK + w
T
where the received signal vector y = [y1 , y2 , · · · , yN ] . Hch
is the channel matrix between user and BS at resource blocks.
T
xK = [x1 , x2 , · · · , xK ] is a vector representing the K users
T
signal. wN = [w1 , w2 , · · · , wN ] is a vector representing
the complex additive white Guassian noise (AWGN) vector
w ∼ CN (0, σ 2 ). H(N,K) = [h1 , h2 , · · · , hK ] denotes ef-
fective wireless channel coefficient matrix. hk denotes that
kth user effective channel coefficient vector. So the received
K at the nth resource block can be written as yn =
signal
k=1 hk xk + wn .
III. PDMA M ULTIUSER D ETECTION A LGORITHM
In this section, we propose a MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm
to separate multiuser signals for PDMA uplink system. A key
component of the algorithm is that we subtract the user’s
information which has been correctly identified. In this paper,
we choose turbo code for channel coding. At the receiving
side, we use the soft MMSE detector to make the information
transmit between detector and decoder is LLR to improve the
probability of correct demodulation of the user. For simplifi-
cation, here we discuss the case of three users sharing on two
orthogonal resource blocks. And we assume that the BS can
get the perfect channel coefficient matrix. The block diagram
of our proposed algorithm is shown in Fig.2.
According to the mentioned in section II, we denote the
T
BS received signal as y = [y11 , y21 , y12 , y22 ] with two
receiving antennas. Where the ynm is the received signal of
nth orthogonal resource block at mth antenna. The received
signal at the first antenna can be written as the Equation (4).
&KDQQHO
&RHIILFLHQW
0DWUL[
A
^G `
//5
\
&KDQQHO GHFRGHU &5&

1 2 N 2)'0
'HPDSSLQJ ^G `
A

DD^ //5 [
&KDQQHO GHFRGHU &5&
ĞƚĞĐƚŽƌ
For example, PDMA pattern matrix for three users sharing \ 2)'0
A
//5 ^G `
on two orthogonal resource blocks can be designed as follows 'HPDSSLQJ &KDQQHO GHFRGHU &5& [
a

[ N
3'0$ &KDQQHO
0DSSLQJ HQFRGHU
 
1 1 0
DD^ͲZͲ^/
(2,3)
HP DM A = (2)
1 0 1
Fig. 2. The block diagram of the proposed multiuser detection algorithm. ym
denotes the BS’s received signal at the mth receiving antenna. LLRk denotes
On receiving side, the BS receives the signal with K users the kth user’s output information of the MMSE detector. {d} ˆ
k denotes the
∼ ˆ
sharing on N orthogonal resource blocks can be represented kth user’s decoded information bits. x k is the reconstructed signal when {d} k
by is correct by CRC check.
 where a is the symbol of M-modulation in bit position
     x 1  
  i when the {b}ik ∈ {0, 1}. We define the LLR =
y11 h11,1 h11,2 h11,3 1 1 0 w11 T
[LLR1 , LLR2 , LLR3 ] to store the output of the MMSE
=  x2 +
y21 h21,1 h21,2 h21,3 1 0 1 w21 detector. And it is the input of the turbo decoder.
x3
   x1   
h11,1 h11,2 0 w11 The output of the channel decoder goes through CRC
= x2 +
h21,1 0 h21,3 w21 module. We are able to determine that the decoded information
x3 ˆ
bits {d} k are correct by CRC module. If user’s signal is
(4) correct (i.e. the indication of CRC module CRC k is zero),
Where the hnm,k denotes kth user’s corresponding wireless we record the index of user’s. C denotes a set of users which
channel matrix. wnm is the corresponding noise. xk denotes are correctly decoded. Signals, which are correctly decoded,
the kth user’s signal. The effective wireless channel coefficient are reconstructed by channel encoding and PDMA mapping.
matrix H can be written ∼
Then we subtract reconstructed signals x of those users from
⎡ ⎤ the superposition signal y
h11,1 h11,2 0
⎢h21,1 0 h21,3 ⎥ 
⎣h h12,2 0 ⎦
(5)
y=y−
∼
hk x k (11)
12,1
h22,1 0 h22,3 k∈C

The MMSE detector relies on the linear filtering matrix The correctly decoding information of users can help other
GMMSE by the mean square error criterion between transmitted users to demodulate and decode. The detail iteration of the
vector and the estimated user signal vector. The estimated user proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC is listed in Algorithm.
signal vector can be denoted as x̂ = GMMSE y.
Algorithm 1 MMSE-CRC-SIC for PDMA multiuser detection
 
The input is: y H x σ 2 , Maximum number of iteration, and
GMMSE = argminG E x − Gy2 the initial C is empty;
(6)
−1 for i = 1toMaximum number of iteration do
H 2 H
= (H H + σ IK ) H while C = {1, 2, ..., K} do
2
where the σ is the noise power at the receiver. We can obtain y = Hx + w
the Winner estimator G LLR ⇐ MMSE soft detector
Channel Decoder ⇐ LLR
CRC check ⇐ the output of Channel Decoder {d} ˆ
−1 k
G = (HH H + σ 2 IK ) HH H (7) if CRC k = 0 then
we define the kth diagonal element of G is Gk,k . According C
∼
⇐k
xk ⇐ {d}ˆ
to [13], we can obtain the LLR of kth user in bit position i k
by Equation (8) end if  ∼
y = y − k∈C hk xk
hk = 0
 (i)  end while
(i) f (y|{b}k = 1)
LLRk = log (i)
end for
f (y|{b}k = 0) The output is the number of error block for each user.
 1 2 
(8)
x:xk ∈Ai1 exp( σ 2 y − Hx )
= log  1 2
x:xk ∈Ai exp( σ 2 y − Hx )
0 IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS
where Aib ⊂ A denotes the set of all symbols in bit position i We present the PDMA uplink simulation results of the
whose label has b ∈ {0, 1}. In order to simplify the calculation, proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm in this section. In the
the log-sum approximation is used to calculate the Equation simulation, we refer the parameter settings in [10]. And
(9) we considerate the case of the three users sharing on two
 orthogonal resource blocks. The detail of parameter settings
(i) 1 is shown in Table 1.
LLRk ≈ minx:xk ∈Ai0 y − Hx2
σ2
 (9) Fig.3 illustrates the average block error ratio (BLER)
2
−minx:xk ∈Ai1 y − Hx performance of different detection algorithms with the signal
noise rate (SNR) ranging from -2dB to 10dB. We compares the
We can form the kth user’s soft-information LLRk of the proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm with the ML algorithm,
output on the MMSE detector by the Equation (10) the MMSE algorithm, the ML-SIC algorithm and the MMSE-
SIC algorithm which are proposed in [2] in two types of chan-
 nels. The ML algorithm searches all the possible constellation
(i) Gk,k x̂k
LLRk = mina∈Ai0  − a2 combinations, and treats the nearest one as the transmitted
1 − Gk,k Gk,k
 (10) symbols. The ML-SIC algorithm is the joint ML with the
x̂k SIC iteration. The MMSE algorithm is the MMSE-CRC-SIC
− mina∈Ai1  − a2
Gk,k without the SIC iteration and CRC module. By analyzing the
 TABLE I. BASIC PARAMETERS OF SIMULATION SCENARIO 3'0$B8/

Parameter Value
Carrier frequency 2GHz
Carrier modulation OFDM
Number of the information bits

(which included the CRC bits) 432 bits
Modulation QPSK
Channel encoder 1/2 Turbo code
Number of users’ antenna 1

%/(5
Number of BS’s antenna 2 8(B006(B&5&B6,&

Channel Uma/Rayleigh iid 8(B006(B&5&B6,&
System bandwidth 10MHz 8(B006(B&5&B6,&
Number of iteration 2 8(B006(B6,&
8(B006(B6,&
 8(B006(B6,&
3'0$B8/
 8(B006(
8(B006(
8(B006(

       
615G%
5D\OHLJKLLG 8PD
$YHUDJH%/(5

Fig. 4. The performance of each user of different detection algorithms in

 PDMA uplink system over Uma channel.
0/8PD
0/6,&8PD
006(&5&6,&8PD

complexity of MMSE-SIC algorithm is o(K 3 ). The proposed

006(8PD
 006(6,&8PD
0/5D\OHLJKLLG
0/6,&5D\OHLJKLLG
algorithm is slightly higher than the MMSE-SIC algorithm.
006(&5&6,&5D\OHLJKLLG
006(5D\OHLJKLLG
The complexity of MMSE algorithm is o(K 3 ). As is known to
006(6,&5D\OHLJKLLG all, the complexity of the ML detector algorithm is o(2M K ),

       where M is the order of modulation. So the complexity of
615G%
the ML-SIC detector algorithm would increase to o(λ2M K ).
The complexity of the proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm
Fig. 3. Comparison the BLER performance of different detection algorithms
in PDMA uplink system over Uma channel and Rayleigh iid channel. is obviously lower than the ML-SIC and ML detection algo-
rithms, it is slightly higher than the MMSE-SIC and MMSE
algorithms.
average BLER of users, the different algorithms’ trend is the
Fig.4 shows the BLER performance of each user over
same in two types of channels. By analyzing the specific data
the Uma channel. By analyzing the BLER of each user,
in Fig. 3, we can find that our proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC
we find that our proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm can
algorithm can get the consistent performance with the other
significantly improve the performance of the first user. The
algorithms at the SNR = −2dB. It is because that the user’s
BLER performance of the first user is significantly superior the
information is difficult to be correctly decoded at the low SNR,
performance of the other users in the proposed algorithm, and
and the SIC iterative process in MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm
it is obviously superior the first user in MMSE-SIC and MMSE
can not be used to reduce the interference between users to
detector. It is caused by the method of the PDMA mapping
improve the BLER performance. But with the increasing of the
by PDMA matrix and the order of decoding in SIC iteration.
SNR, the proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm is significantly
The BLER performance of first user can be improved in the
superior the MMSE algorithm, and the performance gain is
proposed algorithm, when other users’ signals are correctly
increasing with the increasing of SNR. And the proposed
decoded. It is because that we subtract the correctly decoded
MMSE-CRC-SIC can get almost 2dB gap over the MMSE-
users information from the superposed signal to eliminate
SIC, it is because the MMSE-SIC algorithm will bring the
the correctly decoded user’s interference to other user. It can
error propagation when the first decoded user can not be
improve the user’s BLER which is failed decoded in the first
correctly decoded. But the MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm avoids
iteration to improve the probability of the correct demodulation
this problem. With the increasing of the SNR, the proposed
of this time. Compared with the MMSE detector, the MMSE-
MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm can get about 0.2dB performance
SIC algorithm can improve the BLER performance of the
gain of ML algorithm, and MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm can
second and the third users. Compared with the MMSE-SIC
approximate the ML-SIC algorithm.
detector, the MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm can get better BLER
The complexity of the MMSE detector is to compute the performance of second and third users. It is because that the
transformation matrix only. We compute the transformation CRC module avoids the error propagation existed in MMSE-
matrix by direct matrix inversion, so the complexity of MMSE SIC detector algorithm.
is o(K 3 ). The SIC algorithm requires 12 Nt2 + 12 Nt multi-
plications to perform SIC to process one sample vector xk V. C ONCLUSIONS
[14], where the Nt is the transmit antenna. In this paper, the
transmit antenna Nt is one, so the complexity of performing This paper aims to propose a new iterative detection
SIC to process user sample can be ignored. The complexity and decoding algorithm for PDMA uplink system, which
of proposed MMSE-CRC-SIC algorithm is o(λK 3 ) at most, can get high performance with the acceptable complexity.
where λ stands the maximum times of SIC iteration. The The soft MMSE detection supplies the LLR to the channel
decoder to obtain the performance of decoding. Then we
subtract the information of users, who are correctly decoded
by CRC module, from the superimposed signal. With the
prior information of part of users, the decoder can improve
the probability of correctly decoded. The simulation results
show that the proposed algorithm can achieve higher BLER
performance than traditional multiuser detection algorithms
with the acceptable complexity in the PDMA uplink system.

R EFERENCES
[1] Tao Yunzheng, Liu Long, Liu shang, Zhang Zhi, “A Survey: Several
Technologies of Non-Orthogonal Transmission for 5G”, IEEE Commun.
Mag., vol. 12, no.10, pp. 1-15, Nov. 2015.
[2] Bichai Wang, Kun Wang, and Zhaohua Lu, Tian Xie, Jinguo Quan
“Comparison Study of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Schemes for
5G”, IEEE BMSB, pp. 1-5,2015.
[3] F. Boccardi, R. W. Heath Jr, A. Lozano, T. L. Marzetta, and P.
Popovski,“Five disruptive technology directions for 5G”, IEEE Com-
mun. Mag.,vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 74-80, Feb. 2014.
[4] Linglong Dai,Bichai Wang,Yifei Yuan, Shuangfeng Han, Chih-Lin
I, and Zhaocheng Wang. “Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for 5G:
Solutions, Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Research Trends”,
IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 53,no. 9, pp. 74-81, 2015
[5] Yang Lan, Anass Benjebbour, Xiaohang Chen, Anxin Li, Huiling Jiang,
“Considerations on downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)
combined with closed-loop SU-MIMO”, IEEE ICSPCS., no. 8, pp. 1-5,
2014
[6] Hang Mu, Zheng MA, Mahamuda Alhaji, Pingzhi Fan, Dageng Chen,
“A Fixed Low Complexity Message Pass Detector for Up-link SCMA
System”, IEEE Wireless Communication Letters. vol.4, no. 6, pp. 585-
588, 2015
[7] Kexin Xiao, Baicen Xiao, Shutian Zhang, Zhiyong Chen, Bin Xia,
“Simplified Multiuser Detection for SCMA with Sum-Product Algo-
rithm”, IEEE WCSP, pp. 1-5, 2015
[8] M. Taherzadeh, H. Nikopour, A. Bayesteh, and H. Baligh, “SCMA
codebook design”, IEEE VTC Fall., pp. 1C5, Sep. 2014
[9] K. Au, L. Zhang, H. Nikopour, E. Yi, A. Bayesteh, U. Vilaipornsawai,J.
Ma, and P. Zhu, “Uplink contention based SCMA for 5G radio access”,
IEEE GLOBECOM., pp. 1-5, Dec. 2014.
[10] Whiter paper, “5G Concept, 5G Key Technology-Novel Multiple Ac-
cess”, China IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group, Feb, 2015.
[11] Zhiguo Ding, Yuanwei Liu, Jinho Choi, Qi Sun, Maged Elkashlan,
Chih-Lin I, H. Vincent Poor, “Application of Non-orthogonal Multiple
Access in LTE and 5G Networks ”, http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08610v1.
[12] J. Zeng, B. Li, X. Su, L. Rong and R. Xing. Pattern division multiple
access (PDMA) for cellular future radio access. IEEE WCSP. pp.1-5
,2015.
[13] Dominik Seethaler, Gerald Matz, and Franz Hlawatsch, “An Efficient
MMSE-Based Demodulator for MIMO Bit-Interleaved Coded Modula-
tion”, IEEE GLOBECOM, vol. 4, pp. 2455-2459, Aug. 2004.
[14] Tsuang Hsien Liu, “Some Results for the Fast MMSE-SIC Detection
in Spatially Multiplexed MIMO Systems”, IEEE Trans, vol. 8, No.11
pp. 5443-5448, Nov. 2009.