Performance Evaluation of a Simplified Power-Domain NOMA for Visible Light Communications

The performance of a visible light communication (VLC) system based on power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA) is experimentally evaluated in this paper. The simplicity of the adopted non-orthogonal scheme is provided by the fixed power allocation method at the transmitter and the single one-tap equalization executed before the successive interference cancellation at the receiver. The experimental results proved the successful transmission of the PD-NOMA scheme with three users in VLC links of up to 2.5 m, after a proper choice of the optical modulation index. All users achieved error-vector magnitude (EVM) performances below FEC limits in all evaluated transmission distances. At 2.5 m, the user with the best performance reaches an EVM = 2.3 %.