NOMA for Visible Light Communications: Recent Advances and Future Directions

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in NOMA for VLC, highlighting its potential to improve spectral efficiency and support future 6G networks through innovative multiple access strategies tailored to optical links.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of NOMA in VLC, discusses key optimization challenges, and outlines future research directions for integrating NOMA into VLC systems.

Findings

NOMA enables multiple users to share resources efficiently in VLC.

VLC's unique optical characteristics influence NOMA design and optimization.

Future directions include addressing practical constraints and enhancing system performance.

Abstract

Rapidly increasing demand for high speed data is pushing 6G wireless networks to support larger link scales, lower latency, and higher spectral efficiency. Visible light communications (VLC) is a strong complement to radio frequency (RF) systems within 6G. The latest ITU G.9991 and IEEE 802.11bb standards are adapted from cable and RF wireless technologies for use in VLC, so they do not fully exploit the optical nature of light links. VLC links are often asymmetric between uplink and downlink, which makes TDMA style protocols inefficient when many users generate bursty and asymmetric traffic. Compared with RF, the strong directionality and frequent line of sight in VLC can mitigate hidden and exposed terminals, yet these effects can still appear under limited field of view, blockage, or reflections. CSMA/CA and related methods remain usable in VLC and in RF plus VLC networks, but they usually need design tweaks such as RTS/CTS or directional sensing to perform well. Although the optical spectrum is vast, the bandwidth of practical LEDs and of common PIN or APD receivers is limited, so efficient multiple access can yield large gains. This motivates a clean slate design for VLC, especially at the MAC layer. NOMA, first explored in 5G RF systems, is also promising for 6G VLC. It lets multiple users share the same time and frequency resources while tolerating controlled interference. This paper reviews progress in VLC and in NOMA based VLC, outlines key optimization constraints and objectives, surveys scenarios that fit NOMA in VLC, and points to several directions for future work.