Polar codes for the m-user multiple access channel and matroids

In this paper, a polar code for the m-user multiple access channel (MAC) with binary inputs is constructed. In particular, Arıkan’s polarization technique applied individually to each user will polarize any m-user binary input MAC into a finite collection of extremal MACs. The extremal MACs have a number of desirable properties: (i) the ‘uniform sum rate’1 of the original channel is not lost, (ii) the extremal MACs have 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. Provided that the convergence to the extremal MACs is fast enough, the preceding leads to a low complexity communication scheme that is capable of achieving the uniform sum rate of an arbitrary binary input MAC. We show that this is indeed the case for arbitrary values of m.