2017 16th International Conference on Optical Communications and Networks (ICOCN)

Experimental Demonstration of NOMA Visible Light Communications based on

SCFDM
Weiping Ye1, 2, Jian Chen1, Bangjiang Lin2, Xuan Tang2 , Yi Zhang2
1
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China;
2
Quanzhou Institute of Equipment Manufacturing, Haixi Institutes, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
China; chenjiandr@189.com

ABSTRACT flexible multiple access protocol for boosting spectral

efficiency [6]. In [7], experimental demonstration of
We experimentally demonstrated a non-orthogonal NOMA-OFDMA VLC has been carried out for high
multiple access (NOMA) scheme in combination with throughput and high spectral efficiency. However, due to
single carrier frequency division multiplexing (SCFDM) the high PAPR of OFDM, both LED and amplifier
for visible light communications (VLC), which in characteristics should be highly linear over a wide
principle could provide high spectral efficiency, high dynamic range in order to avoid excessive
tolerance against multi-path and a lower intermodulation distortion.
peak-to-average ratio (PAPR). Compared with In this paper, we propose single carrier
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) division multiplexing (SCFDM) based NOMA, which
based NOMA, NOMA-SCFDM has higher tolerance to has high spectral efficiency, high tolerance against
LED nonlinearity and better bit error rate (BER) multi-path, and a lower PAPR. SCFDM has been
performance. compared with OFDM in optical networks [8-9].
However, to our best knowledge, it’s the first time to
Keywords: Visible light communications, combine SCFDM with NOMA in VLC. The feasibility
non-orthogonal multiple access, single carrier of the NOMA-SCFDM VLC is verified with experiment
division multiplexing demonstration. Comparison of NOMA-SCFDM and
NOMA-OFDM in downlink VLC is carried out and the
1. INTRODUCTION experiment result shows that NOMA-SCFDM performs
better than NOMA-OFDM for all data rate.
Visible Light Communications (VLC) based on Light
Emitting Diodes (LEDs) has aroused much interest from 2. SCHEMATIC DIAGRAMS OF TRANSCEIVER
academic and industry, owing to the high luminance data QAM S Subcarrier Add CP/
P
/ IDFT /
efficiency, long life, low cost, low power consumption Modulation
P
Mapping Preamble
S

of LED and license free spectrum, free from (a)

electromagnetic interference, inherent high security of data QAM S

/ DFT
Subcarrier
IDFT
Add CP/
P
/
Modulation Mapping Preamble
VLC [1-2]. Nevertheless, one of the main limitations of P
(b)
S

VLC is its narrow modulation bandwidth, which limits

S P
the increase of achievable data rate. So efficient resource /
Remove
CP
DFT
Channel
Equalization
QAM
Demodulation
/
data
P S
allocation schemes are need for high rate communication. (c)
Since the major advantages of orthogonal frequency S P
division multiplexing (OFDM) are its high spectral /
Remove
CP
DFT
Channel
Equalization
IDFT
QAM
Demodulation
/
data
P S
efficiency and immunity to inter-symbol interference and (d)
frequency selective fading, optical-OFDM is widely Fig. 1 Transmitter structure for (a) OFDM and (b)SCFDM, and
investigated in VLC. Most research works reported on Receiver structure for (c)OFDM and (d)SCFDM.
OFDM-VLC are for reducing high peak-to-average ratio
Fig. 1 shows the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) DSP
(PAPR), OFDM combined multi-inputs multi-outputs
block diagrams for OFDM and SCFDM. At the Tx, data
(MIMO), synchronization and channel estimation
needs QAM modulation for both OFDM and SCFDM
methods [3-5].
before serial to parallel transform. In OFDM,
Recently, a new strategy to enhance the spectral
multi-carriers are the presences of the inverse discrete
efficiency is proposed in 5th generation (5G) wireless
Fourier transform (IDFT) prior to add CP and preamble,
networks, which is non-orthogonal multiple access
then the symbols are sent out after parallel to serial
(NOMA). NOMA technique introduces redundancy by
transform. The major difference between OFDM and
coding in power domain at the transmitters initiatively
SCFDM at the Tx is that one more step of the discrete
and uses successive interference cancellation (SIC) to
Fourier transform (DFT) exists in SCFDM. Therefore,
separate the users at the receivers, which can support
SCFDM is also called DFT-spread OFDM sometimes.
multiple users at the same time-frequency (TF) resources.
The Rx signal process procedure is almost the reversed
NOMA has been reported in VLC as an efficient and

978-1-5386-3273-4/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITE DE MONASTIR. Downloaded on December 10,2021 at 08:27:48 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 2017 16th International Conference on Optical Communications and Networks (ICOCN)

User 1 Source x1 OFDM/SCFDM Power P1

Data Modulation Allocation
Add
+ DAC LED

...
DC
User n Source xn OFDM/SCFDM Power Pn
Data Modulation Allocation

x̂1 OFDM/SCFDM Frame Optical Free Space

Synchronization ADC Detector Optical Channel
Demodulation
-
h2 p1 xˆ1
x̂2 OFDM/SCFDM
Demodulation

...
hn pn 1 xˆn 1 -
xˆn OFDM/SCFDM
Demodulation

Fig. 2 Block diagram of downlink NOMA-OFDM/SCFDM VLC

order of Tx in addition of the channel equalization in the of increasing channel gain in the condition of channel
frequency domain after DFT. Strictly, in OFDM, data condition feedback. Since the channel of downlink VLC
stream is transmitted in frequency domain with random is the same to all users, channel coefficient (h1,h2,…hn)
subcarrier phase and fixed power level. However, in can be treated as h in total.
SCFDM, where the data stream is transmitted in time
domain, it has regular subcarrier phase but different 3. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND RESULT
power level. So SCFDM has lower PAPR than OFDM at
TABLE I. System parameters
the cost of increasing computational complexity at both Parameter Value
Tx and Rx.
LED
MATLAB MATLAB
x Bandwidth < 5 MHz
NOMA-OFDM/ NOMA-OFDM/ x Semi-angle of half power ~ 60o
SCFDM Coder SCFDM Decoder 150 mw
x Transmit power
Pin photodetector
Arbitrary
Scope x Active area 0.8 mm2
Waveform < 0.44A/W
x Responsivity
Generator 17 MHz
Distance x Bandwidth
x Field of view ~90 o
LED
DC supply OFDM/SCFDM modulation
Optical
Receiver x DFT 256
Bias Tee Lens x CP 8
x Modulation format QPSK
Tx Rx
x Propagation distance 2m
Fig. 3 Experimental setup for downlink NOMA-VLC

Fig. 2 shows the architecture of downlink NOMA-

OFDM/SCFDM VLC transceiver with n users. In our
work, we assume that each user uses the whole TF
resources for simplicity. At the Tx, the source data ( x1,
x2, ... , xn) for each user is mapped and encoded into
OFDM/SCFDM symbol prior to power allocation,
respectively. Signals of all users are combined together
and converted into analog signals using a
digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Following the
inclusion of the direct current (DC) bias, the DC-OFDM
is used for intensity modulation (IM) of a LED. Through
the free space optical channel, the optical signal is
detected by a photodiode and then converted into a Fig. 4 BER performance for downlink NOMA-OFDM/SCFDM VLC
digital format using an analog-to-digital converter
(ADC). After frame synchronization, the signal is fed The experimental setup for downlink NOMA-OFDM/
into the SIC module regularly. Each user can remove SCFDM VLC with two users is shown in Figure 3. At
interference from the user whose allocated power P is the Tx, two baseband quadrature phase shift keying
lower than that user. Since user with lower index is (QPSK) OFDM/SCFDM signals are three times
allocated with more power, data of user1 can be derived up-sampled and then up-converted by means of digital
directly after OFDM/SCFDM demodulation. The IQ modulation in MATLAB. The two OFDM/SCFDM
received signal from higher channel gain is treated as signals are combined after allocating different power and
noise. The decoding order of SIC should be in the order then uploaded to an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG

978-1-5386-3273-4/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITE DE MONASTIR. Downloaded on December 10,2021 at 08:27:48 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 2017 16th International Conference on Optical Communications and Networks (ICOCN)
RIGOL DG5352). The DFT and CP sizes are 256 and 8,
respectively. The generated waveform of NOMA-
OFDM/SCFDM is converted into analog streams and
then DC-level shifted using the bias Tee prior to IM of a
commercially available phosphorescent white LED. At
the Rx, an optical lens is put in front of a commercial
optical PD (THORLABS PDA36A) to gather the
divergent light. PD, 2 meters away from the LED, is
used to convert the optical signal back into the electrical
signal. The optical Rx output is passed through ADC and
captured using a real-time digital oscilloscope (RIGOL
MSO4054) for offline signal processing in order to
recover the transmitted data.
Fig. 4 shows the BER performance for
NOMA-OFDM/SCFDM as a function of different
propagation data rates. Each BER is calculated from the
average of the two users, which is based on more than 1
× 105 bits. In order to make a fair comparison between
NOMA-OFDM and NOMA-SCFDM, the parameters are
set to the same shown in Table I. The propagation
distance is 2 meters and the NOMA power allocated
ratios (PARs) are both 0.25. However, the PAPR is
13.05 for NOMA-OFDM and 11.86 for NOMA-SCFDM.
As shown in Fig. 4, NOMA-SCFDM offers improved
BER performance compared with NOMA-OFDM due to
its lower PAPR. Specially, the enhancement gap of BER
performance is significantly improved with the increase
of data rate. So SCFDM also has higher tolerance to the
non-linearity and low 3-dB bandwidth of LED in
NOMA.
Fig. 5 BER performance for two users in downlink NOMA-SCFDM
Fig. 5 shows the BER performance of
NOMA-SCFDM with two users using least square (LS)
equalization. The constellation is captured at the data
rate of 17.86 Mbps. At the Tx, user 1 and user 2 is
allocated with power P1, P2 (P1>P2). At the Rx, the data
of user 1 is decoded prior to decoding the data of user 2.
Since user 1 is directly decoded, its constellation is
standard QPSK constellation with coordinates (±P1, ±P1).
However, due to SIC at the Rx, amplitude offset occurs
in the constellation of user 2, so its constellation has 16
points with coordinates (±P1±P2, ±P1±P2). If the data
demodulation of user 1 cannot be accurately realized, the
data of user 2 cannot be recovered correctly either. As
such, the BER performance of user 1 is better than that
of user 2.
978-1-5386-3273-4/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITE DE MONASTIR. Downloaded on December 10,2021 at 08:27:48 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
4. CONCLUSION
We proposed and experimentally demonstrated a
NOMA-SCFDM scheme for downlink VLC
transmission, which in principle could provide lower
PAPR, flexible bandwidth allocation and a higher system
capacity for a larger number of users. The BER
performance of NOMA-OFDM and NOMA-SCFDM
were compared. The experiment results showed that
NOMA-SCFDM offered improved BER performance
than NOMA-OFDM and the propagation distance
reached 2m.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the National Science
Foundation of China under Grant 61271239, 61501427
and 61601439, in part by the Chunmiao Project of Haixi
Institutes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in part by
Fujian Science Foundation under Grant 2017J05111.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Komine T, Nakagawa M, et al. “Fundamental analysis for
visible-light communication system using LED lights.”
IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 50(1):
100-107㸪2004.
[2] Karunatilaka D, Zafar F, Kalavally V, et al. “LED Based
Indoor Visible Light Communications: State of the Art.”
IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 17(3):
1649-1678, 2015.
[3] Bo Wang, Pin-Han Ho, Chih-Hao Lin, “OFDM PAPR
Reduction by Shifting Null Subcarriers Among Data
Subcarriers” IEEE Communications Letters, 16(9): 1377
-1379, 2012.
[4] Bangjiang Lin, Xuan Tang, Zabih Ghassemlooy, Shihao
Zhang, Yiwei Li, “Efficient Frequency Domain Channel
Equalization Methods for OFDM Visible Light
Communications”, IET Communications, 11(1): 25-29,
2017.
[5] Qian X, Deng Y, Deng H, et al. “Synchronisation
algorithm based on zero correlation code pair for
OFDM-based VLC systems.” IET Communications, 11(2):
205-210, 2016.
[6] Yin Liang, Wu Xiping, Haas Harald. “On the performance
of non-orthogonal multiple access in visible light
communication” International Symposium on Personal,
Indoor, and Mobile Radio communications, 2015: 1354-
1359.
[7] Lin Bangjiang, Ye Weiping, Tang Xuan, et al.
“Experimental demonstration of bidirectional
NOMA-OFDMA visible light communications.” Optics
Express, 25(4): 4348, 2017.
[8] Duo Li, Paikun Zhu, Juhao Li, Yongqi He, Zhangyuan
Chen, “Comparison of CO-SCFDM and CO-OFDM with
high-order QAM mapping,” Asia Communications and
Photonics Conference, 2012: 1-2.
[9] Yuanxiang Chen, Juhao Li, Paikun Zhu, Yingying
Xu; Yongqi He, Zhangyuan Chen, “Experimental
Demonstration of 1.2-Tb/s Optical PDM SCFDM
Superchannel Multicasting by HNLF” IEEE Photonics
Journal, 5(5), 7902007, 2014.