Joint multiuser equalization and group decoding for asynchronous Trellis-coded multiple-access channels

Reduced-complexity multiuser interference equalization and group decoding (ME-GD) is an attractive way to improve performance of multiuser transmissions for narrow-band additive white Gaussian noise channels. ME-GD receivers have been investigated in the past for convolutionally coded synchronous multiple-access channels (MACs). In this paper, we propose a new ME-GD for trellis-coded asynchronous MACs. The coding information of a subset of users and the multiuser interference are jointly taken into account in the branch metric computation using per-survivor processing. The novel approach leads to a family of Viterbi decoders which offers a good tradeoff between performance and complexity. As a second contribution of this paper, we derive theoretical bounds for the performance of ME-GD considering the effect of error propagation, which is critical for asynchronous MACs. Numerical results show the excellent accuracy of the proposed bounds. Finally, based on the novel theoretical analysis, we derive a new criterion to achieve good tradeoffs between performance and complexity.