SCMA Codebook Design Based on Decomposition of the Superposed Constellation for AWGN Channel

In this study, we propose a method named decomposition of the superposed constellation (DCSC) to design sparse code multiple access (SCMA) codebooks for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. We prove that the power of the user symbols (USs) is accurately determined by the power of the superposed constellation (SC). Thus, we select quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations as the SC and decompose the SC into several groups of USs with power diversity. The minimum Euclidean distance (MED) between superposed symbols (SS-MED) in the receiver is determined by the selected QAM and MED between the multi-dimensional codewords (CW-MED) is optimized by matching the symbols on different dimensions. We propose a simplified DCSC (S-DCSC) by modifying the factor graph and avoiding the transmission of USs with low power, which greatly reduces the complexity of the message passing algorithm (MPA). The simulations show that the SS-MEDs of DCSC and S-DCSC are larger than those in previous papers and the BER performance of the proposed codebooks is better than others.