Capacity-Achieving MIMO-NOMA: Iterative LMMSE Detection

This paper considers a low-complexity iterative linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) multiuser detector for the multiple-input and multiple-output system with nonorthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA), where multiple single-antenna users simultaneously communicate with a multiple-antenna base station (BS). While LMMSE being a linear detector has a low complexity, it has suboptimal performance in multiuser detection scenario due to the mismatch between LMMSE detection and multiuser decoding. Therefore, in this paper, we provide the matching conditions between the detector and decoders for MIMO-NOMA, which are then used to derive the achievable rate of the iterative detection. We prove that a matched iterative LMMSE detector can achieve the optimal capacity of symmetric MIMO-NOMA with any number of users, the optimal sum capacity of asymmetric MIMO-NOMA with any number of users, all the maximal extreme points in the capacity region of asymmetric MIMO-NOMA with any number of users, and all points in the capacity region of two-user and three-user asymmetric MIMO-NOMA systems. In addition, a kind of practical low-complexity error-correcting multiuser code, called irregular repeat-accumulate code, is designed to match the LMMSE detector. Numerical results shows that the bit error rate performance of the proposed iterative LMMSE detection outperforms the state-of-art methods and is within 0.8 dB from the associated capacity limit.