Resource Allocation for Cooperative Transmission in Optical Wireless Cellular Networks with Illumination Requirements

Visible light communication (VLC) often suffers from line-of-sight path blockages and high levels of intercell interference. Thus, the analysis and design of cooperation techniques become crucial to address these key impairments. This paper studies the performance of different resource allocation schemes that are suitable for multi-cell cooperative transmission when tri- and tetra-chromatic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and optical orthogonal frequency-division multiple access are utilized. Firstly, guidelines are derived for maintaining the same spatial distribution of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in every sector of the multi-cell environment in case of stand-alone (non-cooperative) and cooperative transmission. Secondly, the possible resource allocation configurations for both stand-alone and cooperative transmission modes are identified for different LED types and available orthogonal resources (i.e., frequency sub-bands per color and sectors per cell). Finally, the data rate gain of the multiple resource allocation configurations are also analyzed, while verifying the illumination constraints. The obtained results confirm that the proper design of cooperative transmission configurations will be of paramount importance to provide reliable wireless link in ultra-dense VLC deployments