Optical SEFDM and NOMA in Visible Light Communications

This paper describes a novel multi-user visible light communication (VLC) system which combines optical spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to make the best use of the frequency resources which are normally very limited when light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are used as data transmitters. We show that, although both optical SEFDM and NOMA have their unique interference problems, it is still feasible to use these two advanced techniques jointly to achieve a highly spectral-efficient optical transmission system. More importantly, the simulation results suggest that the bit error rates (BERs) are below the forward error correction (FEC) limit when low-complexity linear equalizers are used.