Comparative Analytical Study of SCMA Detection Methods for PA Nonlinearity Mitigation

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has emerged as a promising technology that allows for multiplexing several users over limited time-frequency resources. Among existing NOMA methods, sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is especially attractive; not only for its coding gain using suitable codebook design methodologies, but also for the guarantee of optimal detection using message passing algorithm (MPA). Despite SCMA’s benefits, the bit error rate (BER) performance of SCMA systems is known to degrade due to nonlinear power amplifiers at the transmitter. To mitigate this degradation, two types of detectors have recently emerged, namely, the Bussgang-based approaches and the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS)-based approaches. This paper presents analytical results on the error-floor of the Bussgang-based MPA, and compares it with a universally optimal RKHS-based MPA using random Fourier features (RFF). Although the Bussgang-based MPA is computationally simpler, it attains a higher BER floor compared to its RKHS-based counterpart. This error floor and the BER’s performance gap are quantified analytically and validated via computer simulations.