Performance analysis of interleave-division multiple access for uplink in multi-cell environment

Recently, a new multiple access scheme called interleave-division multiple access (IDMA) has been studied where different interleavers are used to distinguish users. This paper focuses on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) -IDMA, which is a combination of OFDM and IDMA, and investigates the throughput performance of OFDM-IDMA for the uplink in multi-cell environment. We analyze the effect of parameters such as the number of iterations on the multiuser detector and the number of users cancelled at the iterative multiuser detector in the base station. Additionally, the throughput performance of OFDM-IDMA is compared with that of OFDMA with an identical transmission rate. The simulation results show that the cell throughput of OFDM-IDMA in multi-cell environment approaches about 90 % of that in an isolated single-cell environment, while the throughput of OFDMA in multi-cell environment degrades by 57.9 % compared to that in single-cell environment due to its less robustness against inter-cell interference than OFDM-IDMA.