In this invited paper, software defined network (SDN)-based approaches for future cost-effective optical mobile backhaul (MBH) networks are discussed, focusing on key principles, throughput optimization and dynamic service provisioning as its use cases. We propose a novel physical-layer aware throughput optimization algorithm that confirms > 100Mb/s end-to-end per-cell throughputs with ≥2.5Gb/s optical links deployed at legacy cell sites. We also demonstrate the first optical line terminal (OLT)-side optical Nyquist filtering of legacy 10G on-off-keying (OOK) signals, enabling dynamic >10Gb/s Orthogonal Frequency Domain Multiple Access (OFDMA) λ-overlays for MBH over passive optical network (PON) with 40-km transmission distances and 1:128 splitting ratios, without any ONU-side equipment upgrades. The software defined flexible optical access network architecture described in this paper is thus highly promising for future MBH networks.

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Many detailed studies ranging from networking to hardware as well as standardization activities over the last few years have advanced the performance of the elastic optical network. Thanks to these intensive works, the elastic optical network has been becoming feasible. This paper reviews the recent advances in the elastic optical network from the aspects of networking technology and hardware design. For the former, we focus on the efficient elastic network design technology related to routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) of elastic optical paths including network optimization or standardization activities, and for the latter, two key enabling technologies are discussed: elastic transponders/regenerators and gridless optical switches. Making closely-dependent networking and hardware technologies work synergistically is the key factor in implementing truly effective elastic optical networks.

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The paper presents ultra-high-capacity transmission technologies based on multi-core space-division-multiplexing. In order to realize high-capacity multi-core fiber (MCF) transmission, investigation of low crosstalk fiber and connection technology is important, and high-density signal generation using multilevel modulation and crosstalk management are also key technologies. 1Pb/s multi-core fiber transmission experiment using space-division-multiplexing is also described.

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We propose multi-core erbium-doped fiber amplifiers for next-generation optical amplifiers utilized by space-division multiplexing technologies. Multi-core erbium-doped fiber amplifiers were studied widely as a means for overcoming exponential growth of internet traffic in the backbone network. We consider two approaches to excitation of erbium irons; One is core-pumping scheme, the other is cladding-pumping scheme. For a core-pumping configuration, we evaluate its applicability to future ultra long-haul network. In addition, we demonstrate that cladding-pumping configuration will enable reduction of power consumption, size, and cost because one multimode pumping laser diode can excite several cores simultaneously embedded in a common cladding and amplify several signals passed through the multi-core erbium-doped fiber cores.

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This paper covers new architectures, technologies, and performance benchmarking together with prospects for high productivity and high performance computing enabled by photonics. The exponential and sustained increases in computing and data center needs are driving the demands for exascale computing in the future. Power-efficient and parallel computing with balanced system design is essential for reaching that goal as should support ∼billion total concurrencies and ∼billion core interconnections with ∼exabyte/second bisection bandwidth. Photonic interconnects offer a disruptive technology solution that fundamentally changes the computing architectural design considerations. Optics provide ultra-high throughput, massive parallelism, minimal access latencies, and low power dissipation that remains independent of capacity and distance. In addition to the energy efficiency and many of the fundamental physical problems, optics will bring high productivity computing where programmers can ignore locality between billions of processors and memory where data resides. Repeaterless interconnection links across the entire computing system and all-to-all massively parallel interconnection switch will significantly transform not only the hardware aspects of computing but the way people program and harness the computing capability. This impacts programmability and productivity of computing. Benchmarking and optimization of the configuration of the computing system is very important. Practical and scalable deployment of photonic interconnected computing systems are likely to be aided by emergence of athermal silicon photonics and hybrid integration technologies.

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This paper proposes a simple and practical scheme to decide the direction of a phased array antenna beam in wireless access systems using Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) technique. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is confirmed by the optical and wireless transmission experiments using 2GHz RoF signals. In addition, two-dimensional steering operation in the millimeter-wave band is demonstrated for targeting future high-speed wireless communication systems. The required system parameters for practical use are also provided by investigating the induced transmission penalties. The proposed detection scheme is applicable to two-dimensional antenna beam steering in the millimeter-wave band by properly designing the fiber length and wavelength variable range.

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In this paper we summarize the work conducted in our group in the area of E- and W-band optical high-capacity fiber-wireless links. We present performance evaluations of E- and W-band mm-wave signal generation using photonic frequency upconversion employing both VCSELs and ECLs, along with transmission over different type of optical fibers and for a number of values for the wireless link distance. Hybrid wireless-optical links can be composed of mature and resilient technology available off-the-shelf, and provide functionalities that can add value to optical access networks, specifically in mobile backhaul/fronthaul applications, dense distributed antenna systems and fiber-over-radio scenarios.

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This paper presents a comparative study of the number of pieces of optical transport equipment, network cost and power consumption depending on the transmission reach of the 400-Gb/s-based signal between flexible-bitrate networks using 100-Gb/s and 400-Gb/s signals and 100-Gb/s-based single-line-rate networks. In this study, we use three types of network topologies: a North American network topology, a European network topology and a Japan photonic network topology. As for the transmission reach of the 400-Gb/s-based signal, considering performance margins, different transmission reaches of the 400-Gb/s signal are assumed varying from 300km to 600km with 100-km increments. We show that the 100-Gb/s and 400-Gb/s-based flexible-bitrate networks are effective for cutting the total number of pieces of equipment and could be effective for reducing network cost and power consumption depending on the transmission reach of the 400-Gb/s signal in the case of a relatively small-scale network.

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We are developing an optical layer-2 switch network that uses both wavelength-division multiplexing and time-division multiplexing technologies for efficient traffic aggregation in metro networks. For efficient traffic aggregation, path bandwidth control is key because it strongly affects bandwidth utilization efficiency. We propose a fast time-slot allocation method that uses hierarchical calculation, which divides the network-wide bandwidth-allocation problem into small-scale local bandwidth-allocation problems and solves them independently. This method has a much shorter computation complexity and enables dynamic path bandwidth control in large-scale networks. Our network will be able to efficiently accommodate dynamic traffic with limited resources by using the proposed method, leading to cost-effective metro networks.

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In conventional networks, service control function and network control function work independently. Therefore, stereotypical services are provided via fixed routes or selected routes in advance. Recently, advanced network services have been provided by assortment of distributed components at low cost. Furthermore, service platform, which unifies componentized network control and service control in order to provide advanced services with flexibility and stability, has attracted attention. In near future, network management system (NMS) is promising, which replies an answer quickly for such advanced service platforms when route setting is requested with some parameters: quality of service (QoS), source and destination addresses, cost (money) and so on. In addition, the NMS is required to provide routes exploiting functions such as path computation element (PCE) actually. This paper proposes scalable network architecture that can quickly reply an answer by pre-computing candidate routes when route setting is requested to a control unit like an Autonomous System (AS). Proposed architecture can manage network resources scalably, and answer the availability of the requested QoS-aware path settings instantaneously for the forthcoming service platform that finds an adequate combination of a server and a route. In the proposed method, hierarchical databases are established to manage the information related to optical network solution and their data are updated at fewer times by discretized states and their boundaries with some margin. Moreover, with multiple and overlapped overlay, it pre-computes multiple candidate routes with different characteristics like available bandwidth and the number of hops, latency, BER (bit error rate), before route set-up request comes. We present simulation results to verify the benefits of our proposed system. Then, we implement its prototype using OpenFlow, and evaluate its effectiveness in the experimental environment.

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We experimentally demonstrate an optical packet and circuit integrated (OPCI) ring network interoperated with a wavelength-switched optical network (WSON) in a network domain. OPCI network and WSON have distinct characteristics from each other: the methods to transfer path control messages and the protocols to set up or delete the optical connections in an optical circuit switch. To interoperate the two types of optical networks, we develop a common path control-plane which can establish or release an end-to-end path by only one autonomous distributed signaling process without stitching. In the common path control-plane, we modify the signaling protocol for OCS so that we can allocate a distinct wavelength to each link on an end-to-end path and also allocate a distinct path route to each of downstream and upstream directions in a bi-directional path. We experimentally show that the common path control-plane can dynamically establish end-to-end paths over the heterogeneous network including the two types of optical networks.

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Triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, the authors have been studying a resilient network whose key element is a movable and deployable ICT resource unit. The resilient network needs a function of robust and immediate connection to a wide area network active outside the damaged area. This paper proposes an application of digital coherent technology for establishing optical interconnection between the movable ICT resource unit and existing network nodes through a photonic network, rapidly, easily and with the minimum in manual work. We develop a prototype of a 100Gbit/s digital coherent transponder which is installable to our movable and deployable ICT resource unit and experimentally confirm the robust and immediate connection by virtue of the plug and play function.

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Nonlinearity compensation algorithm and soft-decision forward error correction (FEC) are considered as key technologies for future high-capacity and long-haul optical transmission system. In this report, we experimentally demonstrate the following three benefits brought by low complexity perturbation back-propagation nonlinear compensation algorithm in 224Gb/s DP-16QAM transmission over large-A_eff pure silica core fiber; (1) improvement of pre-FEC bit error ratio, (2) reshaping noise distribution to more Gaussian, and (3) reduction of cycle slip probability.

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Luby Transform (LT) codes are the first practical implementation of digital fountain codes. In LT codes, encoding symbols are independently generated so as to realize the universal property which means that performance is independent of channel parameters. The universal property makes LT codes able to provide reliable delivery simultaneously via channels of different quality while it may also limit the flexibility of LT codes. In certain application scenarios, such as real-time multimedia transmission, most receivers have tolerable channels whose erasure rates are not fixed, and channels of high erasure rate are outside the design box. In this paper, Connection Choice (CC) codes are proposed to trade the universal property for better performance. The key to CC codes is replacement of random selection with tournament selection. Tournament selection can equalize the frequency of input symbols to join encoding and change the degree distribution of input symbols. Our study indicates that CC codes with appropriate degree distributions provide better performance than the best known LT code when channels of high erasure rate can be ignored. CC codes enable system designers to customize digital fountain codes by taking into account the distribution of the erasure rate and create a new possibility for setting trade-offs between performance and erasure rate.

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The recently suggested regular-type triangular quadrature amplitude modulation (TQAM) provides considerable power gain over square quadrature amplitude modulation (SQAM) at the expense of a slight increase in detection complexity. However, the power gain of the TQAM is limited due to the constraint that signal points should be regularly located at the vertexes of contiguous equilateral triangles. In this paper, we investigate two irregular (optimum and suboptimum) TQAMs where signal points are irregularly distributed while preserving the equilateral triangular lattice, and calculate achievable power gains of the proposed constellations. We also address optimum and suboptimum bit stream mapping methods and suggest a simple and optimum detection method for the constellations to be meaningful in practical implementation, and present analytical and simulation results. The proposed constellations can provide the asymptotic power gains of 0.825dB and 0.245dB over SQAM and regular TQAM, respectively.

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The relay channel is the common approach to cooperative communication. Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) code design for the relay channel is important to cooperative communication. This paper proposes a bilayer QC-LDPC code design scheme for the relay channel. Combined with the bilayer graphical code structure, an improved Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) method, the Biff-CRT method is presented. For the proposed method we introduce a finite field approach. The good performance of the finite field based QC-LDPC code can improve the performance of its corresponding objective QC-LDPC code in the proposed scheme. We construct the FF code and the FA code by the Biff-CRT method. The FF code and the FA code are both named as their two component codes. For the FF code, the two component code are both finite field based QC-LDPC codes. For the FA code, one of the component codes is the finite field based QC-LDPC code and the other is the array code. For the existing CRT method, the shortened array code and the array code are usually used as the component codes to construct the SA code. The exponent matrices of FF code, FA code and SA code are given both for the overall graph and the lower graph. Bit error rate (BER) simulation results indicate that the proposed FF code and FA code are superior to the SA code both at the relay node and the destination node. In addition, the theoretical limit and the BER of the bilayer irregular LDPC code are also given to compare with the BER of the proposed QC-LDPC codes. Moreover, the proposed Biff-CRT method is flexible, easy to implement and effective for constructing the QC-LDPC codes for the relay channel, and it is attractive for being used in the future cooperative communication systems.

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Currently, a correspondent host will have difficulties in establishing a direct session path to a mobile host because of the partial deployment of MIPv6-aware mobile hosts. Even MIPv6-aware hosts will spend up to several seconds to obtain the new location of the mobile host during Layer 3 (L3) handover. This paper proposes an application-level mobility management scheme that can solve the problems related to the increase of Internet traffic end-to-end delay under the current situation that most of the mobile devices are MIPv6-non-aware. The proposed Secure Mobility Management Application (SMMA) enables the updates of care-of address to be faster and more reliable even when L3 handovers occur frequently. SMMA uses a cross-layer approach for session mobility management with the support of Binding Updates to the home agent via IPSec tunnels. The main feature of SMMA is to handle the session-related mobility management for which operation starts just after the completion of name resolution as a pre-call mobility management, which operates in conjunction with the DNS. Our session-related mobility management introduces three new signaling messages: SS-Create for session state creation, SS-Refresh for session state extension and SS-Renewal for updating new care-of address at the mid-session. Finally, this paper analyzes the work load imposed on a mobile host to create a session state and the security strength of the SS-Renewal message, which depends on the key size used.

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The traditional multicast switch fabrics, which were mainly developed from the unicast switch fabrics, currently are not able to achieve high efficiency and flexible large-scale scalability. In the light of lattice theory and multicast concentrator, a novel multistage interconnection multicast switch fabric is proposed in this paper. Comparing to traditional multicast switch fabrics, this multicast switch fabric has the advantages of superior scalability, wire-speed, jitter-free multicast with low delay, and no queuing buffer. This paper thoroughly analyzes the performance of the proposed multicast switch fabric with supporting priority-based multicast. Simulations on packet loss rate and delay are discussed and presented at normalized load. Moreover, a detailed FPGA implementation is given. Practical network traffic tests provide evidence supporting the feasibility and stability of the proposed fabric.

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This paper presents a novel decoupling network consisting of transmission lines and a bridge resistance for a two-element array antenna and evaluates its performance through simulations and measurements. To decouple the antennas, the phase of the mutual admittance between the antenna ports is rotated by using the transmission lines, and a pure resistance working as a bridge resistance is inserted between the two antenna ports to cancel the mutual coupling. The simulation results indicate that the proposed decoupling network can provide a wider bandwidth than the conventional approach. The proposed decoupling network is implemented and tested as a demonstration to confirm its performance. The measurement results indicate that the mutual coupling between the two antenna ports is lowered by about 47dB at the resonant frequency.

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Location fingerprinting utilizes periodic beacons transmitted by Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Access Points (APs) to provide localization in indoor environments. Currently no method is able to quantify the effectiveness of localization information provided by individual APs. Such a metric would enable the optimal placement of new APs as well as eliminating redundant APs so as to reduce the resources consumed by indoor localization software in client devices. This paper proposes LocationInfo, a metric that utilizes walk test data for quantifying the localization efficacy of APs. The performance of LocationInfo is evaluated using two experimental settings. First, it is used for identifying the optimal location for new APs. Second, it is used for filtering out excess APs in a crowded WLAN environment. In both experiments, LocationInfo outperforms existing metrics.

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In LTE (Long Term Evolution)-Advanced system, a transparent MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple Output) scheduling is basically considered, so the performance degradation in channel estimation may occur due to the unpredictable interference from co-scheduled layers. In order to detect and mitigate the interference, traditional binary hypothesis testing based interference detection method and iterative channel estimation method can be applied. However, there are two major problems. First, the binary hypothesis testing based interference detection is not suitable solution for LTE-Advanced system which has four dynamically changing interference hypotheses. Second, the conventional iterative operation does not guarantee sufficient performance gain with limited iteration time due to the estimation error in initial estimation stage. To overcome these problems, we introduce an enhanced iterative channel estimation method which considers simple matrix operation-based partial interference estimation. Based on the outcomes of the partial interference estimation, we can not only detect interference layers individually, but also partially eliminate the interference in initial channel estimation stage. Consequently, the proposed method can effectively mitigate the interference adaptively to the dynamically changing interference condition.

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We propose a power-saving mechanism (PSM) specific to request-and-response-based applications, which simply changes the order of the operating procedure of the legacy PSM by considering the attributes of the request-and-response delay. We numerically analyze the PSM with respect to the energy consumption and buffering delay and characterize this performance by employing a simple energy-delay trade-off (EDT) curve that is determined by the operating parameters. The resulting EDT curve clearly shows that the proposed PSM outperforms the legacy PSM.

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In a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system that adopts zero-forcing (ZF) as a precoder, the best selection is the combination of users who provide the smallest trace of the inverse of the channel auto-correlation matrix. Noting that the trace of the matrix is closely related to the determinant, we search for users that yield the largest determinant of their channel auto-correlation matrix. The proposed technique utilizes the determinant row-exchange criterion (DREC) for computing the determinant-changing ratio, which is generated whenever a user is replaced by one of a group of pre-selected users. Based on the ratio computed by the DREC, the combination of users providing the largest changing ratio is selected. In order to identify the optimal combination, the DREC procedure is repeated until user replacement provides no increase in the determinant. Through computer simulations of four transmit antennas, we show that the bit error rate (BER) per signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as well as the sum-rate performance provided by the proposed method is comparable to that of the full search method. Furthermore, using the proposed method, a partial replacement of users can be performed easily with a new user who provides the largest determinant.

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The effect of transceiver impairments (consisting of frequency offset, phase noise and doubly-selective channel) is a key factor for determining performance of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system since the transceiver impairments trigger intercarrier interference (ICI). These impairments are well known and have been investigated separately in the past. However, these impairments usually arise concurrently and should be jointly considered from the perspectives of both receiver design and system evaluation. In this research, impact of these impairments on an OFDM system is jointly analyzed and the result degenerates to the special case where only a specific impairment is present. A mitigation method aided by segment-by-segment time-domain interpolation (STI) is then proposed following the analysis. STI is general, and its weights can be specified according to the interpolation method and system requirements. Computer simulation is used to validate the analysis and to compare the performance of the proposed method with those of other proposals.

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Landslides during heavy rainfall cause a great amount of damage in terms of both property and human life. To predict landslide disasters, we designed and implemented a wireless sensor network using our existing highly fault tolerant ad-hoc network. Since many sensors must be used, we propose a new MAC protocol that allows the network to support more sensor terminals. Our protocol is a hybrid CSMA/Psuedo-TDMA scheme which allows the terminals to decide their transmission timing independently in a random fashion. A timing beacon is not required, so power consumption can be reduced. Simulation results show that the number of terminals supported by the network can be greatly increased.

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Single Carrier — Frequency Domain Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is a multiple access technique employed in LTE uplink transmission. SC-FDMA can improve system throughput by frequency selective scheduling (FSS). In cellular systems using SC-FDMA in the uplink, interference arising from user equipments (UEs) in neighboring cells degrades the system throughput, especially the throughput of cell-edge UEs. In order to overcome this drawback, many papers have considered fractional frequency reuse (FFR) techniques and analyzed their effectiveness. However, these studies have come to different conclusions regarding the effectiveness of FFR because the throughput gain of FFR depends on the frequency reuse design and evaluation conditions. Previous papers have focused on the frequency reuse design. Few papers have examined the conditions where FFR is effective, and only the UE traffic conditions have been evaluated. This paper reveals other conditions where FFR is effective by demonstrating the throughput gain of FFR. In order to analyze the throughput gain of FFR, we focus on the throughput relationship between FFR and FSS. System level simulation results demonstrate that FFR is effective when the following conditions are met: (i) the number of UEs is small and (ii) the multipath delay spread is large or close to 0.

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This paper describes experiments on passive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission with load modulation. PIN diodes are used as the variable impedance element at the tag side to realize multi-level modulation. The results indicate that the transmission rate of passive MIMO is up to 2 times higher than that of Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) with the same transmission power when the distance between the reader and the tag is 0.5m. Also, when the distance is 1m, MIMO offers up to 1.7 times higher transmission rate than SISO. These results indicate that passive MIMO offers high-speed data transmission even when the distance is doubled.

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Scheduling imposes a trade-off between sum capacity and fairness among users. In some situations, fairness needs to be given the first priority. Therefore, a scheduling algorithm which can flexibly control sum capacity and fairness is desirable. In this paper, assuming the single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA), we propose three scheduling algorithms: modified max-map, proportional fairness (PF)-map, and max-min. The available subcarriers are grouped into a number of subcarrier-blocks each having the same number of subcarriers. The scheduling is done on a subcarrier-block by subcarrier-block basis to take advantage of the channel frequency-selectivity. The same number of non-contiguous subcarrier-blocks is assigned to selected users. The trade-off between sum capacity and fairness is controlled by changing the number of simultaneously scheduling users per time-slot. Capacity, fairness, and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) when using the proposed scheduling algorithms are examined by computer simulation.

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This paper considers uplink interleave division multiple access (IDMA), of which crucial requirement is the proper operability at a very low signal-to-interference-plus-noise power ratio (SINR) range. The primary objectives of this paper are threefold: (1) to demonstrate the achievability of near-capacity performance of bit interleaved coded modulation with iterative detection (BICM-ID) using very low rate single parity check and irregular repetition (SPC-IrR) codes at a very low SINR range, and hence the technique is effective in achieving excellent performance when it is applied for IDMA, (2) to propose a very simple multiuser detection (MUD) technique for the SPC-IrR BICM-ID IDMA which does not incur heavy per-iteration computational burden, and (3) to analyze the impacts of power allocation on the convergence property of MUD as well as on the rate region, by using the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart. The SPC-IrR code parameters are optimized by using the EXIT-constrained binary switching algorithm (EBSA) at a very low SINR range. Simulation results show that the proposed technique can achieve excellent near-capacity performance with the bit error rate (BER) curves exhibiting very sharp threshold, which significantly influences the convergence property of MUD. Furthermore, this paper presents results of the rate region analysis of multiple access channel (MAC) in the cases of equal and unequal power allocation, as well as of a counterpart technique. The results of the MAC rate region analysis show that our proposed technique outperforms the counterpart technique.

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