Non-orthogonal Multiple Access for Multi-cell Indoor VLC

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, real-time feasible NOMA scheme for multi-cell indoor VLC that improves cell-edge user performance with joint decoding, outperforming traditional OMA despite slight SER degradation for other users.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel NOMA scheme for indoor VLC that avoids complex domain processing, enabling practical implementation and enhanced cell-edge user performance.

Findings

NOMA marginally increases average SER compared to OMA.

Cell-edge user SER significantly improved with joint maximum likelihood decoding.

Proposed scheme outperforms successive interference cancellation and OMA.

Abstract

In this letter, we propose a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based scheme for multi-cell indoor visible light communications (VLC), where cell-edge user is jointly served by multiple cells. Unlike the typical designs in the existing literature, the proposed scheme doesn't involve complex domain and direct current bias addition, which makes the design simple and feasible for real time implementation in indoor VLC. The symbol error rate (SER) of the proposed NOMA scheme is analysed using analytical and simulation results, and is compared with orthogonal multiple access (OMA). It is observed that the average SER of the users with the proposed NOMA is marginally degraded as compared to OMA. However, the SER of cell-edge user with the proposed NOMA is significantly improved with joint maximum likelihood decoding, and outperforms successive interference cancellation based decoding and OMA, with trade-off on computational complexity.