The massive connectivity is among other unprecedented requirements which are expected to be satisfied in order to follow the perpetual increase of connected devices in the era of Internet of Things. In contrast to the family of conventional orthogonal multiple access schemes, the key distinguishing feature of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is its capacity to support the massive connectivity. Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is one of the powerful schemes of code-domain NOMA (CD-NOMA) and is among the promising candidates of multiple access techniques to be employed in future generations of wireless communication systems thanks to the sparsity pattern of its codebooks. This technique has been actively investigated in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of SCMA. First, we will pinpoint SCMA place in the NOMA landscape including power-domain NOMA and CD-NOMA with the aim of justifying why SCMA is prominent. Then, its system architecture is highlighted and its basic principles are presented, afterwards a review of exiting codebook designs and available SCMA detectors is provided, before showing how resources are expected to be assigned, and how SCMA can be combined with other existing and emerging technologies. Finally, we present a range of future research trends and challenging open issues that should be addressed to optimize SCMA performance.

Moving platform based coprime linear arrays (CLAs) have been studied in recent years. It is shown that by shifting a CLA a half wavelength, the resulting difference coarray can be regarded as the union of the difference coarray of the original CLA and its two shifted versions with one lag to the left and one lag to the right, respectively, filling the majority or all holes in the difference coarray. However, only the lags which are neighbors of holes are actually useful, while the shifts of the other lags generate lags which already exist, contributing then negligibly to the increase of the degrees of freedom (DOFs). In this letter, an improved CLA configuration for moving platform is proposed. By judiciously designing the sensor positions, all lags can be utilized to fill holes, consequently a difference coarray with more consecutive lags can be obtained. Compared with the original configuration, the proposed configuration can detect more sources with the same number of sensors and same length of array motion.

In active direction of arrivals (DOA) sensing, the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar can lead to more degrees of freedom (DOFs). The DOFs can be further increased when the fourth order cumulants are used in MIMO. However, most array geometries are not designed for fourth order cumulants based MIMO and this array geometry optimization problem is still an open issue. To have a simple guideline for this optimization problem, we reformulate it into two separate problems, which are a fourth order sum coarray optimization problem and a second order difference coarray problem. The fourth order sum coarray optimization is realized by solving a postage stamp problem and a virtual nested array can be obtained. The number of elements in this virtual nested array can be significantly increased with only a few physical sensors. The corresponding inter-element spacing of virtual nested array is expanded simultaneously. Then the second order difference coarray is adopted to the virtual nested array to further increase the DOFs. Numerical results validate the high DOFs achieved by our proposition.

Coprime linear arrays (CLAs) have drawn lots of attention. Efforts have been made to reveal the hole locations in the difference coarrays of CLAs, based on which many methods have been proposed to fill the holes, lengthening the consecutive difference coarray part and increasing the effective degrees of freedom (DOFs). Compared with CLAs, two dimensional (2D) coprime planar arrays (CPAs) are more relevant to real applications. However, no closed-form expressions for the hole locations in the difference coarray of a CPA have been found in the open literature, and the advantage in terms of DOFs of CPAs has not been well explored. In this letter, the structure of the difference coarrays of CPAs is investigated and the exact expressions of all hole positions are provided. Then, a holesfilling method is proposed, by which the most critical holes in the difference coarray can be filled such that a difference coarray with more consecutive lags as well as higher effective DOFs can be obtained.