Sparsity is inherently exploited in sparse code multiple access (SCMA) and sparse vector coding (SVC), yet the interaction between these two has not been explored before. It is intriguing to ask if one can be used to improve the other, and vice versa. In this work, we present a novel SCMA inspired SVC scheme, called SCMA-SVC, for enhanced ultra-reliable low-latency communications. Our key idea is to exploit the sparse pattern and multidimensional constellation nature of SCMA, with which one is able to further enlarge the minimum Euclidean distance (MED) of the corresponding SVC codebooks. Such an innovation allows us to harvest the multiuser coding gain and the constellation shaping gain which are pertinent to SCMA. Moreover, by applying random phase rotations to the sparse vectors, it is shown that the proposed SCMA-SVC achieves full diversity order over Rayleigh fading channels. Under maximum likelihood (ML) decoding, the proposed SCMA-SVC demonstrates remarkable error rate performances over both Gaussian and Rayleigh fading channels. Additionally, we develop a low-complexity decoder that exploits the structural sparsity of SCMA-SVC while maintaining near-ML performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SCMA-SVC achieves significantly improved reliability over the existing SVC variants.

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