On the performance of MIMO-NOMA-based visible light communication systems

• Main Authors: Chen, Chen, Zhong, Wen-De, Yang, Helin, Du, Pengfei
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Visible Light Communication (VLC); Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO)
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/140776
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this letter, we apply the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique to improve the achievable sum rate of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-based multi-user visible light communication (VLC) systems. To ensure efficient and low-complexity power allocation in indoor MIMO-NOMA-based VLC systems, a normalized gain difference power allocation (NGDPA) method is first proposed by exploiting users' channel conditions. We investigate the performance of an indoor 2× 2 MIMO-NOMA-based multi-user VLC system through numerical simulations. The obtained results show that the achievable sum rate of the 2× 2 MIMO-VLC system can be significantly improved by employing NOMA with the proposed NGDPA method. It is demonstrated that NOMA with NGDPA achieves a sum rate improvement of up to 29.1% compared with NOMA with the gain ratio power allocation method in the 2× 2 MIMO-VLC system with three users.