Asynchronous Transmission for Multiple Access Channels: Rate-Region Analysis and System Design for Uplink NOMA

In this work, we thoroughly analyze the rate-region provided by the asynchronous transmission in multiple access channels (MACs). We derive the corresponding capacity-regions, applicable to a wide range of pulse shaping methods. We analytically prove that asynchronous transmission enlarges the capacity-region of MACs. Although successive interference cancellation (SIC) can achieve the optimal sum-rate for the conventional uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) methods, it is unable to achieve the boundary of the capacity-region for the asynchronous transmission. We demonstrate that for the asynchronous transmission, the optimal SIC decoding order to achieve the maximum sum-rate is based on the users' channel strengths. This optimal ordering is in contrast to the conventional uplink NOMA, where various decoding orders can result in the maximum sum-rate. Furthermore, we provide practical transceiver designs to approach the capacity-region. The memory induced by asynchronous transmission enables the use of the trellis-based detection methods which improves the performance. In addition, we propose a transceiver design, based on channel diagonalization to exploit the frequency-selectivity introduced by timing offsets. The proposed transceiver design, joint with the turbo principle, enables us to achieve a rate pair that is not achievable by the synchronous transmission.