Analogous to the nonlinear complementarity problem and the semi-definite complementarity problem, a popular approach to solving the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP) is to reformulate it as an unconstrained minimization of a certain merit function over R n. In this paper, we present a descent method for solving the unconstrained minimization reformulation of the SOCCP which is based on the FischerBurmeister merit function (FBMF) associated with second-order cone [J.-S. Chen, P. Tseng, An unconstrained smooth minimization reformulation of the second-order cone complementarity problem, Math. Programming 104 (2005) 293327], and prove its global convergence. Particularly, we compare the numerical performance of the method for the symmetric affine SOCCP generated randomly with the FBMF approach [J.-S. Chen, P. Tseng, An unconstrained smooth minimization reformulation