INTERLEAVE DIVISION MULTIPLE ACCESS

(IDMA)

By

SAJJAD ASHRAF
MOBILE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
DL STUDENT
SP2013-MSEE-011
CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN ENGINEERING
sajjadashraf@gmail.com
Mob No. 0321-8503485

ABSTRACT

Interleave-division multiple-access (IDMA) is a multiple access scheme that

employs chip-level interleavers for user separation. The performance of code-division
multiple-access (CDMA) systems is mainly limited by multiple access interference
(MAI). Interleave Division Multiple Access (IDMA) is a multiuser scheme which
enables user separation on the basis of interleavers. It can also be regarded as a
special form of CDMA by treating interleaving index sequences as multiple access
codes. It allows a very simple chip-by-chip (CBC) iterative MUD strategy with
complexity (per user) independent of the user number. In this project, I have studied
and discussed transmitter and receiver architecture of IDMA.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.INTRODUCTION TO CDMA.........................................................................4
1.1 CODE DIVISION MULTIPLE ACCESS (CDMA)..................................................4
1.1.1 Why CDMA?................................................................................................4
1.1.2 What is CDMA?............................................................................................4
1.1.3 Spread Spectrum Characteristics...................................................................5
1.2 Limitations in CDMA system..........................................................................5
2. INTERLEAVE DIVISION MULIPLE ACCESS (IDMA)...........................6
2.1 Why IDMA?.....................................................................................................6
2.2 What is IDMA?................................................................................................6
2.3 Comparison of IDMA with CDMA.................................................................7
2.4 IDMA TRANSMITTER STRUCTURE...................................................................8
2.4.1 Spreader.........................................................................................................8
2.4.1.1 FEC Encoder..............................................................................................8
2.4.1.2 Spreader:....................................................................................................9
2.4.2 Interleaver:....................................................................................................9
2.4.3 Channel Coefficient h(k):..............................................................................9
2.5 ITERATIVE CHIP-BY-CHIP RECEIVER..............................................................10
2.5.1 The First Iteration:.......................................................................................10
2.5.2 Random Deinterleaver:................................................................................11
2.5.3 The Decoder:...............................................................................................11
2.5.4 Random Interleaver:....................................................................................12
2.5.5 The Second Iteration:..................................................................................12
2.5.6 Decoder for 2nd Iteration:.............................................................................12
2.6 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................13

1. INTRODUCTION TO CDMA
In this chapter, I will emphasize on the features of CDMA and then I will
proceeds towards IDMA. I have discussed limiting factors in CDMA that forms the
basis towards the research of a new multiple access technique. IDMA is normally
defined as the special case of CDMA. Therefore after gaining basic knowledge of
CDMA, I will move to the introduction of IDMA.

1.1 Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)

Some of the main features of CDMA related to IDMA are high lightened as:

1.1.1 Why CDMA?

The first CDMA network was commercially launched in 1995, and provided
roughly ten times more capacity than analog networks, more than TDMA-based
DAMPS or GSM. Since then, CDMA-based mobile cellular has become the fastest
growing of all wireless technologies, with over 100 million subscribers worldwide
today. In addition to supporting more traffic, CDMA-based mobile cellular systems
bring many other benefits to carriers and consumers, including better voice quality,
broader coverage, lower average power emission, stronger security, privacy, low
probability of interception, good protection against multi-path interference.

1.1.2 What is CDMA?

Code division multiple accesses exploit the nature of spread spectrum
transmission to enable multiple users to independently use the same bandwidth with
very little interference [1]. CDMA is a "spread spectrum" technology, allowing many
users to occupy the same time and frequency allocations in a given band/space. As its
name implies, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) assigns unique codes to each
communication to differentiate it from other users in the same spectrum. Figure 1.1 of
CDMA transmitter is shown here:

X1
USER 1

FEC

INTERLEAVER

SPREADER 1
X2

USER 2

FEC

INTERLEAVER

SPREADER 2

.
.
.

.
.
.

USER M

FEC

INTERLEAVER

XM

SPREADER M

Figure 1.1 CDMA transmitters

In a world of finite spectrum resources, CDMA enables many more people to

share the airwaves at the same time than do alternative technologies. Some more basic
features of CDMA are as under:

1.1.3 Spread Spectrum Characteristics

The basic features of Spread spectrum in CDMA are:
1. The signal occupies a bandwidth much greater than that which is necessary
to send the information. This results in many benefits, such as immunity to
interference and jamming and multi-user access.
2. The receiver synchronizes to the code to recover the data. The use of an
independent code and synchronous reception allows multiple users to
access the same frequency band at the same time.
3. Due to spread spectrum techniques eavesdropping is avoided.
4. Same frequency can be use in all cells by using CDMA.

1.2 Limitations in CDMA system

Some of the main disadvantages/limitations of CDMA are:
1. With the increase of users, the performance of CDMA systems decreases.
2. Orthogonality of codes use to distinguish the users in CDMA is necessary
otherwise MAI and self jamming will occur in the system.
3. CDMA systems require good power control; otherwise system may suffer
near-far problem, interference and noise.

2. INTERLEAVE DIVISION MULIPLE ACCESS

(IDMA)
IDMA may be considered as a special Code-Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) scheme. Some description is as under:

2.1 Why IDMA?

The performance of code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems is mainly
limited by multiple access interference (MAI). In the wake of the success of turbo
codes, turbo-type iterative multi-user detection (MUD) has been extensively studied
to mitigate MAI, and significant progress has been made. However, complexity and
cost has always been a stringent concern for MUD.
Iterative multi-user detection has been widely investigated as a potential
approach to enhance the performance of CDMA systems and significant progress has
been made recently. The complexity of CDMA multi-user detection has always been a
serious concern for practical systems, which increases rapidly with the number of
users.
An interleave-based multiple access scheme has been studied in for high
spectral efficiency, improved performance and low receiver complexity. IDMA
inherits many advantages from CDMA, in particular, diversity against fading and
mitigation of the worst-case other-cell user interference problem. Furthermore, it
allows a very simple chip-by-chip iterative MUD strategy.

2.2 What is IDMA?

Interleave-division multiple-access (IDMA) [2] is proposed scheme that
employs chip-level interleavers for user separation. It is a special case of CDMA in
which bandwidth expansion is entirely performed by low-rate coding. It can also be
regarded as a special form of CDMA by treating interleaving index sequences as
multiple access codes. The performance of an IDMA system is strongly dependent on
interleavers.
Different users are separated only by different interleavers as opposed to
different frequency carriers as in FDMA or different time slots as in TDMA or
different signature sequences as in CDMA. All of the users employ a common
spreading sequence. This scheme relies on interleaving as the only means to

distinguish the signals from different users and hence it has been called interleavedivision multiple-access (IDMA).
X1
USER 1

FEC

SPREADER

INTERLEAVER 1
X2

USER 2

FEC

SPREADER

INTERLEAVER 2
.
.
.

.
.
.
USER M

FEC

SPREADER

XM

INTERLEAVER M

Figure 2.1 IDMA transmitters

2.3 Comparison of IDMA with CDMA

IDMA may be considered as a special Code-Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) scheme. The differences and commonalities of conventional CDMA in
conjunction with channel coding (top part) and IDMA (bottom part).

Figure 2.2 Comparison of IDMA with CDMA

IDMA may be interpreted as follows:

1. The ordering of interleaving and spreading is reversed. In IDMA, forward
error correction (FEC) and spreading can be combined in a single encoder
(ENC), which is the same for all users. As a consequence, very low-rate
encoding is used. The spreader has no fundamental relevance any more. The
spreader (i.e., a repetition code) may be used to simplify the overall encoder,
however.
2. The interleaver may be interpreted as a key word. Only authorized receivers
are able to decode the message.

2.4 IDMA Transmitter Structure

The Figure 2.3 shows the transmitter structure of the multiple access scheme
under consideration with K simultaneous users.
h (k)

d1

Spreader

(k)

C j (k)

Spreader

dk

x j (k)

j
Cj

(k)

AWGN

(k)

rj
(k)

X
x j (k)

Figure 2.3 Transmitter structure of an IDMA scheme with K simultaneous users

2.4.1 Spreader
In CDMA the spreader comes after the Interleaver, which is key principle for
user separation, shown in fig 2.1. While in IDMA, spreader consists of two parts, FEC
encoder and Spreader.

2.4.1.1 FEC Encoder

Both CDMA and IDMA uses Low rate Convolution Encoder. Convolution
codes can be devised for correcting random errors, burst errors or both [3]. It consists
of buffer which takes 1 bit and transforms it into 2 bit encoded stream. Basic
Convolution encoder is shown in figure below,

O/P
1

X
O
R

CODED DATA

USER DATA

1 0 11

1 0 0 1 0 1 0 11

X
O
R

O/P2

Figure 2.4 Convolution Encoder of rate 1/2

In this model, the input data sequence dk of user-k is encoded based on a lowrate code C, generating a coded sequence ck= [ck (1),, ck (j), ..., ck (J)]T, where J is
the frame length. Both of Convolution encoded streams are concatenated and then
treated as independent channel for every user.

2.4.1.2 Spreader:
Referring to figure 2.3, the spreading operation in CDMA is done after
interleaving and is used for user separation. Each user is assigned orthogonal code and
Number of user is dependant on length of spreading code.
While in IDMA, spreading is performed before Interleaving and is not used
for user separation. There are basic two types of spreading codes, Orthogonal Codes
and Repetitive codes.

Orthogonal codes consist of equal number of 1 and -1. Data is balanced i.e.,
consist of equal number of 1s and -1, after spreaded by Orthogonal codes. CDMA
uses orthogonal codes.
While in Repetitive code, each bit is repeated into number of times, equal to
the length of spreaded code. An example of repetitive code is [1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1]. In
repetitive code, data after spreading is biased towards 1 or -1 depend upon the value
of spreading code.

2.4.2 Interleaver:
As discussed earlier, the main difference between CDMA and IDMA is
interleaving. The basic purpose of Interleaver in CDMA is to combat against burst
errors. While the only mean for user separation in IDMA system is unique Interleaver,
which is user specified. There are two basic conditions for designing of Interleavers.
Firstly, Data within User should be UNCORELATED. That is, there should
not more than one bit in each spreaded sequence. Further, any bit at any location in a
byte should be uncorrelated.
Secondly, Data of all Users should be UNCORELATED. This can be
maintained by giving different interleaving pattern for different users.
Referring figure 2.3, ck is permutated by an interleaver k, producing xk = [xk
(1), , xk(j), , xk(J)]T. Following the CDMA convention, the elements in xk are
called chips.

2.4.3 Channel Coefficient h(k):

Channel coefficient is used for following purposes,
a. Used for unequal power distribution for all the users. This is basic requirement for
approaching Shannons limit.
b. Used to combat Fading and Multipath effects.

2.5 Iterative Chip-by-Chip Receiver

Receiver structure of an IDMA scheme with K simultaneous users are shown
in figure 2.5. The iterative chip-by-chip receiver consists of an Elementary Signal
Estimator (ESE) and a bank of K single-user a posteriori probability decoders DES.
We first assume that the channel has no memory. Then the ESE starts a chip by chip
estimation called the Maximum Likelihood estimation. The received signal at time
instant j can be written as

rj h ( k ) xj ( k ) nj

j=1,2,..J

(2.1)

k 1

where xj

(k )

{ 1, 1}

denotes the transmitted chip from user-k at time instant j,

h ( k ) the channel coefficient for user k, and n j zero-mean additive white Gaussian

noise (AWGN) with variance 2 = N0/2.

rj

Figure 2.5 Receiver structure of an IDMA scheme with K simultaneous users

2.5.1 The First Iteration:

The iterative chip-by-chip receiver in Fig. 2.5 consists of an elementary signal
estimator (ESE) and a bank of K single-user a posteriori probability decoders for the
despreading operation (DES) working in a turbo-type manner, as shown in Fig. 2.5.
The ESE performs chip-by chip estimation.

rj h ( k ) xj ( k ) j ( k )
where j

(k )

(2.2)

r j h ( k ) xj ( k ) represents a distortion term with respect to xj ( k ) .

During the first iteration ESE allocates equal energy to every bit of every user xj

(k )

which is the mean energy obtained by dividing the received bit to number of users
(8,16 and 32) by using the following equation.
K

E ( rj ) h ( k ) E ( xj ( k ) )
k 1

(2.3)

Each xj

(k )

as a random variable with mean E ( xj

(k )

) and variance Var ( xj

(k )

(initialized to 0 and 1 respectively). During first iteration the mean of random variable
and the mean of received bit would be same because every user has the same amount
of distributed energy. This information is then sent to Random Deinterleaver.

2.5.2 Random Deinterleaver:

For user-k, the corresponding ESE outputs

interleaved to form

{L(cj ), j 1,2,. . . . j}
(k )

{L(xj ), j 1,2,. . . . j}
(k )

are de-

and delivered to the DES for user-k. Every user

deinterleaver is distinguished by different and unique initial seed provided to it.

2.5.3 The Decoder:

The IDMA decoder has two distinct parts; The Despreader (DES) and, The
Decoder.
Output of every Deinterleaver works as input to the decoder. The DES performs a
soft-in/soft-out chip-by-chip de-spreading operation as detailed below. For simplicity,
we focus on the chips related to d 1
chips is similar. Recall that d 1

(k )

(k )

the first bit of user-k. The treatment for other

is spread into a chip sequence by using spreading

code.

The

{L(cj )}
(k )

in fig 2.5 is uncorrelated which is approximately true due to

interleaving. Using the A posteriori probability (APP) each received bit is despreaded
by multiplying it with the spreading code in bitwise manner and then divides it by the
length of spreading code. This despreaded data is then respreaded in a similar way as

did in the transmitter. The a posteriori LLR for d 1

(k )

can be computed using

{L(cj )}
(k )

as
s

L(d 1( k ) ) sj ( k ) L(cj ( k ) )

(2.4)

j 1

The extrinsic LLR for a chip (cj ) within d 1( k ) s ( k ) for only first iteration is
(k )

defined by
Ext {( cj

(k )

)}= d 1( k ) s ( k )

(2.5)

2.5.4 Random Interleaver:

Let the interleaving for user-k be expressed as

(k )

( j)

j ' i.e cj

(k )

= xj

(k )

. The

output from Decoder Ext (cj ) (extrinsic LLRs) is now fed back to ESE for the
(k )

second iteration. This output for every user passes through unique Random interleaver
(which is same as used in transmitter for every user) before entering ESE.

2.5.5 The Second Iteration:

For this and onward iteration the previously initialized mean and variance (as
0 and 1 respectively) are updated to new values calculated as follows
K

E ( rj ) h ( k ) E ( xj ( k ) )

(2.6a)

k 1

Var ( rj ) h ( k ) Var ( xj ( k ) )

(2.6b)

k 1

Using the central limit theorem, j

(k )

in (2) can be approximated by a

Gaussian random variable with

E (j ( k ) ) E ( r j ) h ( k ) Exj ( k )
Var ( j

(k )

) Var ( r j ) h ( k ) Var ( xj ( k ) )

(2.7a)
(2.7b)

The ESE outputs are the logarithm likelihood ratios (LLRs) about { xj
computed based on (2.7) as

L( xj ( k ) )

2h ( k ) (r j E (j ( k ) ))
Var (j ( k ) )

(2.8)

(k )

2.5.6 Decoder for 2nd Iteration:

The decoder implements the following equations to calculate Ext (cj ) for
(k )

next iterations.
s

L(d 1( k ) ) sj ( k ) L(cj ( k ) )

(2.9a)

j 1

Ext (cj

(k)

Pr(cj ( k ) 1 | r )
) log
L(cj ( k ) )
(k)
Pr(cj 1 | r )

This is the decision making point and cj

(k )

(2.9b)

=+1 if sj

(k )

= d1

(k )

and cj

(k )

=-1

otherwise Therefore,
Ext (cj ( k ) ) sj ( k ) L( dj ( k ) ) L(cj ( k ) )

(2.9c)

Difference between 1st and 2nd Iteration Decoder:

In the 1st iteration take the mean of individual bit i.e E(xj) and respread it.
While in the 2nd iteration we take the difference sj L( dj
(k )

(k )

) (respreaded data) and

L(cj ( k ) ) (input to the decoder). This iterative process is repeated a preset number of

times. In the final iteration the DES produces hard decisions d 1( k ) on information bits
d 1( k ) based on (2.5).

The detection algorithm does not rely on coding unlike other methods used in
CDMA, but introducing coding can further enhance performance (details omitted
here). The principle can be generalized to situations with multipath fading. For
complexity, notice that (2.3) involves summations over all of the users, but the results
(and so the cost) are shared by all of the users.

2.6 Conclusion
A new multi user scheme named IDMA has been studied. The basic principle
is to use interleavers for user separation. It allows very low-cost multiuser detection.
The related cost is only two additions and two multiplications per chip per user per
iteration. A very large number of users can be processed with modest computing
power. Complexity is not a serious concern for multiuser detection. Near Shannon
capacity performance is observed for multiple access channels.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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February 8, 2006.
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[3] B.P Lathi., Modern Digital and Analog Communication System, 3rd ed., Oxford
University Press., March 1998.
[4] Bernard Sklar., Digital Communications-Fundamentals and applications,2nd ed,
Pearson Education,Inc., New Delhi, 2001
[5] Simon Haykin, Michael Moher., Modern Wireless Communications, Pearson
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