Experimental demonstration of a hybrid OFDMA/NOMA scheme for multi-user underwater wireless optical communication systems

In this work, a hybrid multiple access scheme for multi-user underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems is proposed and presented. The scheme combines the respective advantages of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme to reduce the unfairness among users caused by the unique high-frequency fading characteristics of the underwater optical channel. Multi-verse optimizer (MVO) algorithm is further introduced for solving the nonlinear problem of user power allocation. Experimental results in different water quality environments demonstrate that the hybrid OFDMA/NOMA scheme with MVO effectively improves the communication performance of the established 4-user UWOC system compared to the pure NOMA scheme and the pure OFDMA scheme, and a system sum rate of 3.94 Gbit/s is achieved.