RESEARCH ARTICLE SLLR‐MDIC: Spatial log‐likelihood multiuser detection and interference cancelation scheme for OFDM‐IDMA Dolly Sharma 1 | Rabinder Singh 2 | Himanshu Katiyar 3 1 Department of Electronics & Communication, Babu Banarsi Das Engineering College, Lucknow, India 2 Department of Electronics and Communications, Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology, Sultanpur, India 3 Department of Electronics and Communication, Rajkiya Engineering College, Sonbhadra, India Correspondence Dolly Sharma, Assistant Professor, Department of Electronics & Communication, Babu Banarsi Das Institute of Technology, Lucknow, India. Email: phd.dolly.sharma@gmail.com Summary Wireless communication systems have gained huge attraction from research community, industrial, and academic field due to their significant impact on improving the communication efficiency, ease of deployment, and cost‐ effective solution for real‐time communication. In this field of wireless commu- nication, cellular communications have grown rapidly due to their daily usages and advantages. This increased demand of cellular communication systems has led to the evolution of 3G, 4G, and 5G communication systems, which in turn demands for higher efficiency and better bandwidth utilization. Due to heavy usage of network communication, multiple users may cause interference which subsequently may lead to the performance degradation which could be addressed using multiuser detection scheme. However, several schemes have been introduced for improving the system performance, but multiple access (MA) still remains a challenging task. Hence, in this work, we present a novel approach called Spatial Log‐Likelihood Multiuser Detection and Inter- ference Cancelation (SLLR‐MDIC) that uses interleaving division multiple access (IDMA) to improve the communication and developed a multiuser detection approach using spatial log‐likelihood ratios. Further, we have devel- oped orthogonal frequency‐division multiple access (OFDM)–IDMA‐based interference cancelation scheme in multiple access to improve the performance using rake receiver based approach. The performance of SLLR‐MDIC scheme is compared with existing techniques of multiuser detection in terms of bit‐ error rate (BER) and symbol error rate (SER). The experimental analysis shows that proposed approach achieves improved performance when compared with existing techniques. KEYWORDS IDMA, interference cancelation, mobile communication, multiuser detection, OFDM 1 | INTRODUCTION Real‐time communication systems have noticed a significant growth due to huge improvement in wired and wireless communications standards. This increased growth in communication systems has motivated real‐time application to urge for high‐efficient communication to offer the better quality of service (QoS) to the end users. Traditionally, wired communication have been broadly investigated and implemented for different types of networking applications. Over Received: 17 January 2019 Revised: 11 May 2019 Accepted: 4 July 2019 DOI: 10.1002/dac.4119 Int J Commun Syst. 2019;e4119. https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.4119 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac 1 of 16