On FEC Design for Interleave Division Multiple Access

Unlike other conventional multiple access techniques such as TDMA or FDMA, this paper demonstrates that the proper choice of forward error control (FEC) codes for Interleave Division Multiple Access (IDMA) is a function of the number of users. By means of Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts and Monte-Carlo simulations it is shown that extremely weak single user codes can surprisingly be the best choice when the number of users is high.