Abstract
Visible light communications (VLC) technology has recently emerged as a complementary technology to the indoor radio frequency (RF) networks. While the backhauling of the indoor RF networks has been supported by fiber optics, the backhauling of the VLC network is still an open research problem. Power line communications (PLC) has been considered as a possible solution for the VLC networks due to its ubiquity. However, given the noisy behaviour of the channels, the use of PLC backhauling requires further study to investigate the maximum rate which can be supported for VLC networks. In this paper, we continue our work on a single-user hybrid PLC/VLC/RF system [1] to study the effect of PLC backhauling in multi-user hybrid VLC/RF networks. To this end, we adopt an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)- based PLC backhaul system where we find the optimal power and subcarrier allocation algorithm that maximizes the multi-user rate utility function for the cascaded PLC and VLC links in parallel with the RF network. Moreover, we study numerically the impact of various parameters on the system performance including the PLC transmission power, the RF and VLC maximum allowable rates, and the numbers of mobile terminals and access points.
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