Location-Assisted Coding for FSO Communication

Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth in the number of wireless devices. This development has fueled much research in wireless access technologies to efficiently use radio frequency spectrum. On the other hand, recent advances in free space optical (FSO) technologies promise a complementary approach to increase wireless capacity. In this paper, we describe WiFO, a hybrid WiFi and FSO high-speed wireless local area network of femtocells that can provide high bit rates while maintaining seamless mobility. Importantly, we introduce a novel location-assisted coding (LAC) technique, based on which, the number of novel rate allocation algorithms is proposed to increase throughput and reduce interference for multiple users in a dense array of overlapped femtocells. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results show orders of magnitude increase in throughput using LAC over existing schemes for various random topologies.