Abstract
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an effective multiple access scheme that can be used to improve considerably the spectral efficiency of indoor downlink visible light communication (VLC) systems. However, NOMA suffers from inevitable multi-user interference which degrades the system performance. In this paper, a NOMA scheme is applied in a downlink VLC system and the impact of the multi-user interference on the system performance is studied. A closed-form expression for the user symbol error rate (SER) is derived and a decoding-order-based power allocation (DOPA) method is proposed to reduce the multi-user interference and find the optimal power allocation that minimizes the SER. The significance of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by simulation. The results show that the proposed DOPA method is able to reduce effectively the multi-user interference and provide more sum rate in comparison with benchmarking schemes such as the gain ratio PA (GRPA) and the normalized gain difference PA (NGDPA) methods.