Abstract
Targeting to provide reliable short-packet communications with tens of bits in machine-type networks, we investigate a novel sparse code multiple access (SCMA) scheme called delayed bit-interleaved coded SCMA (DBIC-SCMA). At the transmitter side, a delay module is introduced between each channel encoder and SCMA mapper such that data bits from different channel codewords can be mapped to an identical SCMA codeword. We present the main components and principles for the transmitter of DBIC-SCMA, followed by a pre-decoding assisted receiver design which exploits systematic and rate-adaptive properties of certain channel codes. Our simulation results show that the proposed DBIC-SCMA leads to significant improvements in error rate performance over the classical BIC-SCMA scheme.