Coding for Two-User SISO and MIMO Multiple Access Channels

Constellation Constrained (CC) capacity regions of a two-user SISO Gaussian Multiple Access Channel (GMAC) with finite complex input alphabets and continuous output are computed in this paper. When both the users employ the same code alphabet, it is well known that an appropriate rotation between the alphabets provides unique decodability to the receiver. For such a set-up, a metric is proposed to compute the angle(s) of rotation between the alphabets such that the CC capacity region is maximally enlarged. Subsequently, code pairs based on Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) are designed for the two-user GMAC with M -PSK and M -PAM alphabet pairs for arbitrary values of M and it is proved that, for certain angles of rotation, Ungerboeck labelling on the trellis of each user maximizes the guaranteed squared Euclidean distance of the sum trellis. Hence, such a labelling scheme can be used systematically to construct trellis code pairs for a two-user GMAC to achieve sum rates close to the sum capacity of the channel. More importantly, it is shown for the first time that ML decoding complexity at the destination is significantly reduced when M -PAM alphabet pairs are employed with almost no loss in the sum capacity. A two-user Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) fading MAC with Nt antennas at both the users and a single antenna at the destination has also been considered with the assumption that the destination has the perfect knowledge of channel state information and the two users have the perfect knowledge of only the phase components of their channels. For such a setup, two distinct classes of Space Time Block Code (STBC) pairs derived from the well known class of real orthogonal designs are proposed such that the STBC pairs are information lossless and have low ML decoding complexity.