Dr. Adeel Pasha, Assistant Professor and Director of the Electronics and Embedded Systems Lab (EESL) at the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE), Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE) presented a paper titled, "Towards Design and Automation of Hardware-Friendly NOMA Receiver with Iterative Multi-User Detection" at the 54th Annual IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC 2017) held in Austin, Texas, from June 18 to 23, 2017. The article is the result of the Faculty Initiative Fund (FIF) grant allotted to Dr. Adeel Pasha in 2016-2017.
Mr. Muhammad Hassan Ahmad (MSEE-2015), Muhammad Aimal Rehman (former RA and MSEE-2017 student) and Dr. Momin Uppal are the co-authors of this paper. The paper also won the HEC International Travel Grant as well as LUMS Faculty Travel Grant (FTG).
The paper consider a two-user non-orthogonal-multiple-access (NOMA) communication channel with an iterative multi-user receiver. It is known that NOMA provides performance gains over conventional orthogonal-multiple-access, but it comes at the cost of increased decoder complexity. Moreover, the decoder complexity varies with fraction of duration in which the users’ transmissions overlap using NOMA. For this scheme, the authors presented a hardware-friendly implementation of an LDPC-code-based multi-user-detector (MUD). They also presented a MATLAB-based high-level design-automation tool that generates hardware descriptions of different NOMA-receivers. Results indicate that the simplified MUD design results in significant area and power savings with negligible impact on performance.
