Sparse Code Multiple Access For 5g Radio Transmission

Non-orthogonal multiple access has been extensively discussed in New Radio (NR), the study item working on 5G air interface in 3GPP. Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is one of the proposed MA schemes. In this paper, the basic concept of SCMA is introduced, including codebook mapping, multiple access procedure, and advanced receivers. Then, link-level simulations are applied to verify the design of SCMA, which show that SCMA has many excellent properties: shaping and diversity gain by sparse codebooks, resilient to inter-user interference, and robust to codebook collision, thus it is a promising candidate MA scheme for 5G.