Design and Decoding of Polar Codes for the Gaussian Multiple Access Channel

Abstract: Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) is one of the key application scenarios for future 5G networks. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique for the use in mMTC scenario. In this paper, we investigate NOMA schemes based on polar codes. We compare two possible decoding techniques: joint successive cancellation algorithm and joint iterative algorithm. In order to optimize the codes (choose frozen bits) we propose a special and efficient design algorithm. We investigate the performance of the resulting scheme in the Gaussian multiple access channel (GMAC) by means of simulations. The scheme is shown to outperform LDPC based solution by approximately 1 dB and to be close to the achievability bound for GMAC.