Aligning the Light Based on the Network Topology for Visible Light Communications

Abstract

Visible light communications (VLC) are considered as a key element of the future cellular network. However, the deployment of several optical access points (AP) involves to cope with the interference in a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channel. In this sense, adaptation of the transmit precoding (TPC) schemes typically proposed for radio-frequency (RF) systems have been considered. However, these TPC schemes are not flexible to the topology of the VLC scenarios, which are characterized by forming amorphous cells, i.e., clusters composed of several APs, from a user-centric perspective. In this work, we propose a Blind Interference Alignment (BIA) scheme based on a user-centric approach that only requires the knowledge of the network topology avoiding the need for Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT) or cooperation among APs. Simulation results show that the proposed user-centric BIA results more suitable for VLC networks in comparison with other BIA or TPC schemes.