A novel bandwidth and power allocation scheme for power efficient hybrid RF/VLC indoor systems

Abstract

Indoor Visible Light Communication (VLC) uses the illumination power of indoor LED luminaries for data transmission. Deploying RF communication alongside VLC is preferable as it improves the coverage and the reliability of the system. This paper studies the power efficiency of hybrid RF/VLC indoor systems. The power efficiency is defined as the system’s total rate per unit power consumed, and the paper considers a hybrid system consisting of a single RF access point and multiple interfering VLC access points. We develop a joint power and bandwidth allocation scheme that iteratively optimizes the power and bandwidth allocated by the access points to their associated users to maximize the system’s power efficiency. We compare the power efficiency of the hybrid system for different layouts of the VLC access points, and we show through simulations that deploying VLC alongside RF communication improves the power efficiency of the hybrid system, especially when users receive low RF signal due to walls.