Bidirectional LiFi Attocell Access Point Slicing Scheme

LiFi attocell access networks will be deployed everywhere to support diverse applications and service provisioning to various end-users. The LiFi infrastructure providers will need to offer LiFi access points (APs) resources as a service. This, however, requires a research challenge to be solved to dynamically and effectively allocate resources among service providers (SPs) while guaranteeing performance isolation among them and their respective users. This paper introduces an autonomic resource slicing (virtualization) scheme, which realizes autonomic management and configuration of virtual APs, in a LiFi attocell access network, based on SPs and their users service requirements. The developed scheme comprises of traffic analysis and classification, a local AP controller, downlink and uplink slice resources manager, traffic measurement, and information collection modules. It also contains a hybrid medium access protocol and an extended token bucket fair queueing algorithm to support uplink access virtualization and spectrum slicing. The proposed resource slicing scheme collects and analyzes the traffic statistics of the different applications supported on the slices defined in each LiFi AP and distributes the available resources fairly and proportionally among them. It uses a control algorithm to adjust the minimum contention window of user devices to achieve the target throughput and ensure airtime fairness among SPs and their users. The developed scheme has been extensively evaluated using OMNeT++. The obtained results show various resource slicing capabilities to support differentiated services and performance isolation.