Hybrid Lightwave/RF Cooperative NOMA Networks

We propose an indoor lightwave downlink wireless communication network with the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology, that consists of one visible light communication (VLC) access point (AP) and a pair of randomly located users. Although both users can directly receive information from the AP, the performance of the far user is degraded compared to the near one due to the asymmetrical channel gains. Thus, the user cooperation strategy is proposed to improve the performance of the far user by using mixed VLC/RF relaying technique in parallel with the wireless optical direct link. To efficiently exploit the available heterogeneous links, the concept of cross-band selection combining (CBSC) is introduced, according to which the far user is continuously served by either the mixed VLC/RF or the direct VLC link. Meanwhile, the performance of the proposed scheme is thoroughly investigated and compared to appropriate baselines. To this end, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability of each user as well as the system sum throughput. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and the accuracy of the corresponding analysis.