SCMA with Low Complexity Symmetric Codebook Design for Visible Light Communication

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is attracting significant research interests currently, which is considered as a promising multiple access technique for 5G systems. It serves as a good candidate for the future communication network with massive nodes due to its capability of handling user overloading. Introducing SCMA to visible light communication (VLC) can provide another opportunity on design of transmission protocols for the communication network with massive nodes due to the limited communication range of VLC, which reduces the interference intensity. However, when applying SCMA in VLC systems, we need to modify the SCMA codebook to accommodate the real and positive signal requirement for VLC.We apply multidimensional constellation design methods to SCMA codebook. To reduce the design complexity, we also propose a symmetric codebook design. For all the proposed design approaches, the minimum Euclidean distance aims to be maximized. Our symmetric codebook design can reduce design and detection complexity simultaneously. Simulation results show that our design implies fast convergence with respect to the number of iterations, and outperforms the design that simply modifies the existing approaches to VLC signal requirements

Experimental demonstration of SCMA for visible light communications

We propose an experimental demonstration of sparse code multiple access (SCMA) based visible light communications (VLC) system, in which the multi-dimensional codewords selected from a predefined codebook set are used to encode the transmitted data and a message passing algorithm (MPA) based multi-user receiver is used to detect the multiplexed codewords. Compared with the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access scheme, the SCMA scheme offers 150% overloading gain in the number of supported users at the cost of slightly decreased transmission performance