Polar Codes for the m-User MAC

Abstract

In this paper, polar codes for the $m$-user multiple access channel (MAC) with binary inputs are constructed. It is shown that Arıkan's polarization technique applied individually to each user transforms independent uses of a $m$-user binary input MAC into successive uses of extremal MACs. This transformation has a number of desirable properties: (i) the `uniform sum rate' of the original MAC is preserved, (ii) the extremal MACs have uniform rate regions that are not only polymatroids but matroids and thus (iii) their uniform sum rate can be reached by each user transmitting either uncoded or fixed bits; in this sense they are easy to communicate over. A polar code can then be constructed with an encoding and decoding complexity of $O(n \log n)$ (where $n$ is the block length), a block error probability of $o(\exp(- n^{1/2 - \e}))$, and capable of achieving the uniform sum rate of any binary input MAC with arbitrary many users. An application of this polar code construction to communicating on the AWGN channel is also discussed.