Resource allocation for hybrid visible light communications (VLC)-WiFi networks

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is becoming a promising technology of wireless communication, due to high data rate, low cost, and immunity to Radio Frequency (RF) interference. However, the VLC systems often suffer from service disruptions because of the limited coverage of light. Therefore, the heterogeneous networks of VLC and WiFi are proposed to achieve high-speed indoor communication and seamless coverage. This paper investigates an efficient heterogeneous network resource management algorithm, which is not only significant to integrate the current network resources but also has practical significance to improve the performance of heterogeneous networks. We establish a distributed joint resource management system model and propose two kinds of resource management allocation strategies to allocate bandwidth among the users with maximum fairness. The simulation results show the feasibility of the heterogeneous network and the effectiveness of the algorithm.