Outage Probability Region and Optimal Power Allocation for Uplink SCMA Systems

As a promising non-orthogonal multiple access scheme, sparse code multiple access (SCMA) technology has attracted much attention. Because inter-user interference is present in code domain and multi-user iterative detection is required, user capacity and outage probability analysis for uplink SCMA systems are challenging and have not been presented in the literature. In this paper, the capacity region for uplink SCMA systems is analyzed, based on which the common and individual outage probability regions are calculated. Optimizing the outage probability within the outage probability region can be carted as an Lagrangian duality problem and solved by an iterative descent algorithm, which however imposes high complexity since the expectation operation is required in each iteration. To reduce the computational complexity of solving this Lagrangian duality problem, an adaptive algorithm is developed, which is capable of providing the optimal outage probability and adaptively updating it. Furthermore, a power allocation policy is naturally obtained to achieve the optimized outage probability in the outage probability region.