Energy-Efficient TDMA-NOMA for RIS-Assisted Ultra-Dense VLC Networks

This paper proposes an energy-efficient optimization technique for downlink indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems using hybrid non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). The approach considers a hybrid time division multiple access-NOMA (TDMA-NOMA) to provide massive connectivity to multi-clusters. Clusters of users are formed using NOMA while TDMA is used to allocate a specific time slot within a communication frame. The proposed technique optimizes the precoding at the multi-LED transmitter, RIS tuning parameters, and time-slot allocation parameters for each cluster to maximize the system’s energy efficiency (EE). The EE optimization problem is solved through the block coordinate descent (BCD) framework, which splits the optimization problem into two blocks. An alternating optimization (AO) framework is used in the first block to optimize the transmit precoding through conic quadratic programming (CQP) and RIS tuning parameters through a semidefinite programming (SDP) technique based on the surrogate optimization method. The second block allocates energy-efficient time-slot for each cluster through linear programming (LP) approach to further improve the EE of the system. The simulation results indicate that the proposed BCD framework achieves fast convergence and excellent performance in terms of the EE of the system while maintaining low computational complexity.