Rate Optimization for IDMA Systems with Iterative Multi-User Decoding

In this paper, we develop a rate allocation scheme for interleave-division multiple-access (IDMA) systems with iterative decoding. We use a fully-analytical approach to predict the performance of the scheme and propose a modified linear programming method to design the rate profile. Numerical results show that with just repetition coding and rate allocation, the performance of the scheme is only about 5 dB away from the capacity for a wide range of SNR, provided that the number of users is sufficiently large. Compared with power allocation schemes for IDMA, the proposed rate allocation scheme achieves a similar performance at a moderate spectral efficiency and the requirement of sophisticated power amplifiers can be relaxed.