A Symmetric ICA-Based CDMA Receiver for Dense IoT-Enabled Healthcare Monitoring Systems

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled healthcare systems, including wearable medical sensors and remote patient monitoring devices, has led to dense multiuser communication scenarios in which numerous low-power devices simultaneously transmit physiological data. In such environments, multiuser interference significantly degrades reliability and increases error rates, which may compromise clinical decision-making. This paper proposes a real-time symmetric Independent Component Analysis (ICA)-based Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) receiver, termed symmetric independent CDMA (i-CDMA) receiver, to enhance multiuser detection in dense healthcare IoT networks. Unlike conventional ICA-CDMA receivers that utilize the orthogonality of users' spreading codes and higher-order statistics (HoS) of users' message symbols in signal separation, the proposed approach utilizes a symmetric independence process that jointly utilizes the independence of separating codes and the statistical independence of users' message symbols. The proposed receiver avoids the runtime optimization of scaling parameter for different user densities and SNR conditions. Furthermore, a modified whitening transform is introduced to exploit the complete signal-plus-noise subspace while avoiding overlearning. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement over symmetric Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization-based standard ICA-CDMA receiver in terms of bit error rate (BER) under varying SNR and user-density scenarios for both uplink and downlink systems. The proposed receiver provides a scalable and interference-resilient communication framework suitable for real-time IoT-enabled healthcare monitoring applications.