3446 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO. 5, MAY 2018
Finally, the proposed algorithms are evaluated via Monte Carlo
simulations. The results demonstrate the superior performance
of the proposed message passing receivers for MIMO-SCMA
system and also show the great potentials of using cooperative
detection.
The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-
lows. In Section II, the system model of the consid-
ered MIMO-SCMA is introduced. Section III develops a
low-complexity receiver based on stretched factor graph.
In Section IV, we propose a convergence-guaranteed receiver
by convexifying the Bethe free energy. Two distributed coop-
erative detection methods are investigated in Section V. Simu-
lation results are shown and discussed in Section VI. Finally,
conclusions are drawn in Section VII.
Notations: We use a boldface letter to denote a vector.
The superscript T and −1 denote the transpose and the
inverse operations, respectively; N denotes the neighboring
set of a variable or a function; G(m
x
,v
x
) denotes a Gaussian
distribution of variable x with mean m
x
and variance v
x
; |·|
denotes the modulus of a complex number or the cardinality
of a set; ·
2
denotes the
2
norm; ∝ represents equality up
to a constant normalization factor; x\x denotes all variables
in x except x.
II. P
ROBLEM FORMULATION
A. System Model
We consider a K-user downlink MIMO-SCMA system,
where each user is equipped with a single antenna and the base
station is equipped with J transmit antennas. In the orthogonal
multiple access scenario, we usually set K ≤ J to avoid inter-
user interferences. In the non-orthogonal scenario, K can be
greater than J and we define =
K
J
as overloading factor.
The SCMA encoder is a mapping function that maps every
log
2
M coded bits to an J-dimensional SCMA codeword. The
codewords are selected from a user-specific SCMA codebook
of size M .Letx
n
k
=[x
n
k,1
,...,x
n
k,J
]
T
be the transmitted
codeword of user k at time instant n, which is a sparse vector
with D<Jnonzero entries. Then the codewords can be
multiplexed over J transmit antennas at the base station. The
block diagram of the considered system is illustrated in Fig. 1.
Let’s denote the transmitted symbol at the jth antenna and
time instant n by s
n
j
,thens
n
j
is given by
s
n
j
=
K
k=1
x
n
k,j
. (1)
In order to capture the sparse feature of SCMA, a binary
indicator vector f
k
is introduced for user k,wherethejth
element in f
k
is given by
f
k,j
=
0 x
k,j
=0
1 x
k,j
=0.
(2)
The indicate matrix is given as F =[f
1
,...,f
K
],wherethe
nonzero entries in the jth row denote the conflicting users over
the jth antenna while the nonzero entries in the kth column
indicate the resources occupied by user k.
Fig. 1. System model for downlink MIMO-SCMA.
The signal from base station transmits over frequency selec-
tive fading channels with L taps and is received at different
users. With the assumption of perfect synchronization between
the base station and users, the received signal at user k and
time instant n can be further written as
y
n
k
=
J
j=1
L−1
l=0
h
l
j,k
s
n−l
j
+ ω
n
k
, (3)
where h
l
j,k
is the lth tap coefficient of the multipath channel
between the jth antenna and kth user, and ω
n
k
is additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) at time instant n with power spectral
density N
0
.
B. Probabilistic Model
Assuming that N codewords are transmitted, we further
denote X
k
and y
k
as transmitted SCMA codewords and
received signal samples of the kth user, and X as the trans-
mitted symbols of all users. Assuming perfect channel state
information, each user can perform the optimal maximum a
posteriori (MAP) detection based on measurement y
k
,which
can be expressed as
ˆ
X
k
=argmax
X
k
p(X
k
|y
k
)
=argmax
X
k
p(X|y
k
)dX\X
k
. (4)
Following Bayesian rules, p(X|y
k
) reads
p(X|y
k
) ∝ p(X)p(y
k
|X) (5)
where p(X) is the joint aprioridistribution and p(y
k
|X) is
the joint likelihood function. Since all transmitted symbols are
assumed independent, we have p(X)=
j,k,n
p(x
n
k,j
),where
p(x
n
k,j
) is calculated based on the log likelihood ratios (LLRs)
of coded bits from the output of channel decoder.
The computational complexity of the optimal MAP receiver
in (4) increases exponentially with the product of the number
of users, the number of antennas and the channel length.
In the following, we develop low-complexity message passing
receivers for MIMO-SCMA system.