Performance Analysis of Maximum-Correntropy Based Detection for SCMA

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has emerged as a promising multiple-access technique capable of accommodating many users over limited time-frequency resources. Among several NOMA techniques, sparse code multiple access (SCMA) has emerged as viable due to its promise of high coding-gain by appropriate codebook-design and simplistic detection using message-passing algorithm (MPA). However, the performance of classic SCMA based systems are severely impaired by impulsive noise (IN), which causes outages and therefore non-negligible degradations to the bit-error-rate (BER) performance. Exploiting the robustness of the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC) to non-Gaussian noise processes, an MPA based detector is formulated with message-functions derived from the MCC criterion. Based on the said MCC criterion, concurrent-adaptation of the MCC’s spread-parameter is proposed in this letter. Lastly, analytical results for the proposed approach’s BER performance are presented with corresponding validation by computer-simulations.