Performance analysis of a low-complexity nonorthogonal multiple access scheme in visible light communication downlinks using pulse modulations

Although Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) decoding is widely adopted in Nonorthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) schemes for the recovery of user data at acceptable complexity, the imperfect SIC would cause Error Propagation (EP), which can severely degrade system performance. In this work, we propose an SIC-free NOMA scheme in pulse modulation based Visible Light Communication (VLC) downlinks, including two types of users with different data rate requirements. Low bit-rate users adopt on-off keying, where as high bit-rate ones use Multiple Pulse Position Modulation (MPPM). The soft decision decoding scheme is exploited by high bit-rate users to decode MPPM signals, which could fundamentally eliminate the detrimental effect of EP; the scheme is also easier and faster to execute compared with the conventional SIC decoding scheme. Expressions of the symbol error rate and achievable data rate for two types of users are derived. Results of the Monte Carlo simulation are provided to confirm the correctness of theoretical results.