Coalition Formation for Interference Management in Visible Light Communication Networks

Visible light communication (VLC) can accomplish the two-fold goal of illumination and short-range communication with the advantages of low cost, free spectrum, natural confidentiality, and low energy consumption, whereas interference management is a major challenge in VLC networks. In this paper, we propose a coalition formation framework for interference management in VLC networks. VLC access points (APs) are designed to self-organize into cooperation coalitions for interference cancellation through orthogonal time or frequency domain. The performances of VLC APs with and without forming coalitions are both analyzed. Based on coalition formation game theory, a simple merge-and-split algorithm based on Pareto order is proposed. The convergence, stability, and complexity of the proposed algorithm are further discussed. Numerical results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.