Asynchronization-Aided Ultra-Reliable Receiver for SCMA in Satellite-Terrestrial Communication

This paper proposes an asynchronization-aided iterative detection and decoding (AIDD) scheme for sparse code multiple access (SCMA) in satellite-terrestrial communication scenario, where the messages between the detector and decoder are iteratively exchanged with an additional degrees- of-freedom (DoF) in terms of delay. We first propose a parallel expectation propagation algorithm (P-EPA) for asynchronous multiuser detection, where a new initialization method is introduced by efficiently utilizing the prior information to enhance the performance of the detector. Furthermore, a universal soft-output decoder (S-OLD) is proposed based on the ordered likelihood decoder (OLD), which can generate the soft information with high reliability and serve as the input of P-EPA in the proposed AIDD. The iteration between the P-EPA and S-OLD is terminated when the maximum iteration number of the outer loop is achieved or the decoding results of all the users are converged. Simulation results show that the proposed P-EPA has better performance and lower latency compared to its counterparts, and the proposed AIDD also has better performance and fewer iterations than the synchronous IDD and joint detection and decoding (JDD) schemes.