An Analysis of the Error Rate Performance for Uplink Asynchronous Signal Detection in Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

We investigate multiuser detection under uplink asynchronous scenario, where the triangular successive interference cancellation (T-SIC) detection scheme is exploited. As the existing analysis was conducted under some ideal assumptions for simplicity, the asynchronous scenario is analyzed under rigorous assumptions in this paper so that important insights are revealed for practical systems. Specifically, the average symbol error rate (SER) formulas are derived for a two-user system with arbitrary $M$ -ary quadrature amplitude modulation ( $M$ -QAM) over Rayleigh fading channels. These solutions are shown to have higher accuracies compared to the existing solutions. Furthermore, a novel iterative detection algorithm is proposed, i.e., the parallel T-SIC method, which is more efficient and effective compared to the iterative T-SIC method. Insightful discussion is conducted in terms of the potentials of the concerned iterative detection method. Simulation results show that the most significant improvement of the iterative detection reflects on the SER for the strongest user, and the reduction is always within 50% of the SER compared to the primary detection. The gains obtained by the iterative detection is negligible for higher order $M$ -QAM cases.