Comparison of PD-NOMA for RF and VLC Based Vehicular Communication Under Various Weather Conditions

Abstract

In order to provide vehicles with reliable, ubiquitous, and massive connectivity, an appropriate multiple access (MA) scheme should be adopted. An appealing MA scheme referred to as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been gaining significant attention in vehicular networks among academia and industry. This work aims to show the technical feasibility of uplink vehicular-VLC system (V-VLC) using OPD-NOMA, which is a promising technique for future intelligent transportation system which has not been explored before. We aim to present a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis on the performance of Optical Power Domain-NOMA (OPD-NOMA) based Vehicular Visible Light Communication (V-VLC) systems. In particular, we aim for designing V-VLC systems with robust information exchange over various weather conditions such as rain, light fog, dense fog, dry snow, etc. We make use of various analytical tools of stochastic geometry to derive theoretical expression for outage probability and throughput by modelling the location of the vehicle as a spatial Poisson point process. We compare the performance of OPD-NOMA based V-VLC with Vehicular Radio Frequency (V-RF) communication for three different traffic scenarios (i.e., sparse, medium, and dense traffic) in terms of outage probability and throughput. Our numerical results reveal that instead of viewing V-VLC as competing technology, it can be visualized as complementary technology to V-RF technology under different environmental conditions for future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to meet diverse requirements of 5G networks and beyond.