Abstract
Multiple access (MA) technique is a major building block of the cellular systems. Through the MA technique, the users can simultaneously access the physical medium and share the finite resources of the system, such as spectrum, time and power. Due to the rapid growth in demand on data applications in mobile communications, there has been extensive research to improve the efficiency of cellular systems. A significant part of this effort focuses on developing and optimizing the MA techniques. As a result, many MA techniques have been proposed systematically over the years, and some of these MA techniques are already been adopted in the cellular system standards such as Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). There are many factors that determine the efficiency of the MA technique such as spectral efficiency, low complexity implementation as well low envelope fluctuations. Mainly, the MA techniques can be categorized into orthogonal and non-orthogonal MA. In orthogonal MA techniques, the signal dimension is partitioned and allocated exclusively to the users, and there is no Multiple Access Interference (MAI). For non-orthogonal MA techniques, all the users share the entire signal dimension, and there is a MAI. Thus, for non-orthogonal transmission, more complicated receiver is required to deal with the MAI comparing to orthogonal transmission. Non-orthogonal MA is more practical in the uplink scenario because the base station can afford the Multiuser Detection (MUD) complexity. On the other hand, for downlink, orthogonal MA is more suitable due to the limited processing power at the user equipment. Many non-orthogonal MA techniques have been overlooked due to the implementation complexity. Evidently, the recent advancements in signal processing have opened up new possibilities for developing more sophisticated and efficient MA techniques. Thus, more advanced MA techniques has been proposed lately. However, in order to adopt these new MA techniques in the mobile communication systems, many challenges and opportunities need to be studied.