Performance Improvement of M-QAM OFDM-NOMA Visible Light Communication Systems

Visible light communication (VLC) system is a great candidate for indoor downlink access. Due to the limitation of light-emitting diode (LED)'s bandwidth, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used to enhance the transmission capacity of VLC system. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can support multiple users in VLC system by sharing time and spectrum resources. The combination of OFDM and NOMA improves the overall channel capacity and spectral efficiency of a multi-user VLC system. In order to increase the data rate further, high order modulation formats are often applied. However, for the superposition of multiple high order modulation signals such as 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 64-QAM, it is hard to recover each user's signal under traditional successive interference cancellation (SIC) method, which is usually used in NOMA scheme. In this paper, we proposed a novel method to decode the superposed signals. This method is called ergodicity and comparison (EAC). By applying the EAC method, the bit error rate (BER) performance of two-user OFDM-NOMA VLC system is investigated under different power allocation conditions. In this system, the modulation formats for both the two users' signals are 4-QAM, 16-QAM and 64-QAM. Peak clipping effect on the received superposed signals is also considered. Numerical results demonstrate that the EAC method can improve significantly the BER performance of OFDM-NOMA VLC system, when high order M-QAM (M> 4) signals are applied to the two users.