On the Performance of Energy-Division Multiple Access Over Fading Channels

In this paper we consider a multiple-access scheme in which different users share the same bandwidth and the same pulse, and are discriminated at the receiver on the basis of the received energy using successive decoding. More specifically, we extend the performance analysis from the case of additive white Gaussian noise channels (presented in a previous work Salvo Rossi in Wirel Pers Commun, in press) to the case of fading channels. The presence of channel coefficients introduces a new degree of freedom in the transceiver design: unlike the AWGN case, different ordering among the users provides different transmitted energy, thus different overall system performance. Optimal ordering, in terms of minimum transmitted energy, is derived analytically. Analytical and numerical results, in terms of bit error rate and normalized throughput, are derived for performance evaluation in fading environments with optimal ordering exhibiting significant gains w.r.t. static ordering.