On non-cooperative block-faded orthogonal multiple access schemes with correlated sources

In this paper, we study the performance of noncooperative multiple access systems with noisy separated channels, where correlated sources communicate to an access point (AP) through block-faded links. In the considered scenario, perfect channel state information (CSI) is assumed at the receiver while no CSI is available at the transmitters. We first consider uncoded transmissions from the sources to the AP, which exploits the source correlation to carry out joint channel detection (JCD). In this scenario, we propose an analytical approach to evaluate the achievable performance in terms of average bit error rate (BER). We then investigate the impact of coding, considering the same fixed coding scheme at each source. Then, we consider an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart-based framework to optimize the design of concatenated and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for JCD schemes.