  Spectral efficiency of low-density spreading non-orthogonal multiple access
channels in the presence of fading is derived for linear detection with
independent decoding as well as optimum decoding. The large system limit, where
both the number of users and number of signal dimensions grow with fixed ratio,
called load, is considered. In the case of optimum decoding, it is found that
low-density spreading underperforms dense spreading for all loads. Conversely,
linear detection is characterized by different behaviors in the underloaded vs.
overloaded regimes. In particular, it is shown that spectral efficiency changes
smoothly as load increases. However, in the overloaded regime, the spectral
efficiency of low- density spreading is higher than that of dense spreading.
