Packet acquisition for spatially coupling information transmission

The problem of packet timing acquisition for random access multi-user communications is considered. The users employ coupling information transmission format to encode and modulate their data packets and communicate them to the common receiver. Two reception strategies are studied: the case in which packet acquisition is followed by multi-user decoding of the coupled data packets and the case in which packet acquisition is included into the iterative multi-user decoding loop. An analysis of the iterative acquisition and decoding is presented and communication rates achievable for various preamble lengths are computed. It is demonstrated that incorporation of packet acquisition into the data decoding and interference cancellation loop is essential for establishing near-capacity communications with practical preamble lengths.