An experimental study of NOMA in underwater visible light communication system

Abstract In this paper, power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is introduced in underwater visible light communication (UVLC) to improve the spectrum efficiency and the sum transmission rate. A NOMA-UVLC system employing two LEDs with different colors is designed to improve the propagation efficiency, by bearing different information on different carriers. We experimentally investigate the BER performance of the system in air and water environment, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed NOMA system works better in underwater environment than in air environment. The total transmission rate in underwater environment achieves 117.4 Mb/s when employing red/blue LEDs in the proposed system, and 93.9 Mb/s when employing red/green LEDs in the proposed system, with a transmission distance of 1 m.