A comparative analysis of diversity combining techniques for repetitive transmissions in time spreading <scp>SCMA</scp> systems

Abstract Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) is a recently introduced wireless communication network technology. There are various techniques in SCMA systems to increase the system's efficiency, and one of these techniques is time spreading. By adding repetitive transmission and time spreading into SCMA, it is shown in previous works that the Bit‐Error‐Rate (BER) results are improved convincingly. However, in the previous works, other diversity combining techniques have not been considered. This paper introduces a new approach to further improve the performance of repetitive transmission in SCMA systems with time spreading by adding imperialist competitive algorithm in diversity combining. Alongside, four different combining techniques; equal gain combining, maximal ratio combining, selection combining, and genetic algorithm are considered to bring comparative analysis to show the significance of the new technique. Results show that the proposed method offers up to 2.3 dB gain in terms of BER, under certain conditions.