On the Need of Angle Diversity Receiver for Downlink NOMA-Based Visible Light Communication Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been proposed as a promising candidate technology for the next generation multiple access (NGMA). Applied to visible light communication (VLC), NOMA is subject to the small and confined coverage footprint provided by each optical access point (AP), which lea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE open journal of the Communications Society Vol. 6; pp. 6177 - 6193
Main Authors Al-Sakkaf, Ahmed Gaafar Ahmed, Morales-Cespedes, Maximo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 2025
Subjects
angle diversity receiver (ADR)
Diversity reception
Light emitting diodes
NOMA
non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)
Optical filters
Optical noise
Optical receivers
Optical sensors
Optical signal processing
power allocation (PA)
Resource management
Visible light communication
Visible light communication (VLC)
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ISSN2644-125X
2644-125X
DOI10.1109/OJCOMS.2025.3590763

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Summary:Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been proposed as a promising candidate technology for the next generation multiple access (NGMA). Applied to visible light communication (VLC), NOMA is subject to the small and confined coverage footprint provided by each optical access point (AP), which leads to small channel differences among users within the coverage footprint of the same optical AP as well as to intercell interference from neighboring APs. This condition may result in a poor performance of NOMA. In this work, we analyze the impact of angle diversity receivers (ADRs) on the performance of NOMA in VLC. The concept of tangential power allocation (TPA) is proposed to obtain a trade-off between achievable sum-rate and fairness. Specifically, two methodologies are proposed to calculate the TPA coefficients for ADRs assuming both approaches to manage the combination of photodiodes; select best combining (SBC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC). Simulation results show that the concept of ADR considerably increases the number of users that can be served by applying NOMA. Moreover, the SBC approach provides similar rate to MRC, which motivates to relax the complexity of the receivers. It is also shown that the proposed TPA achieves a greater performance in terms of sum-rate and fairness than baseline power allocation schemes.
ISSN:2644-125X
2644-125X
DOI:10.1109/OJCOMS.2025.3590763