Trellis-Coded Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Abstract: In this letter, we propose a trellis-coded nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. The signals for different users are produced by trellis coded modulation (TCM) and then superimposed on different power levels. By interpreting the encoding process via the tensor product of trellises, we introduce a joint detection method based on the Viterbi algorithm. Then, we determine the optimal power allocation between the two users by maximizing the free distance of the tensor product trellis. Finally, we manifest that the trellis-coded NOMA outperforms the uncoded NOMA at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).