Joint link scheduling and brightness control for greening VLC-based indoor access networks

Demands for broadband wireless access services are expected to outstrip the spectrum capacity in the near-term "spectrum crunch." Deploying additional femtocells to address this challenge is cost-inefficient due to the backhaul challenge and the exorbitant system maintenance. According to an Alcatel-Lucent report, most mobile Internet access traffic happens indoors. Leveraging power line communication and the available indoor infrastructure, visible light communication (VLC) can be utilized with a small one-time cost. VLC also facilitates the great advantage of being able to jointly perform illumination and communications, and little extra power beyond illumination is required to empower communications, thus rendering wireless access with small power consumption. In this study, we investigate the problem of minimizing total power consumption of a general multiuser VLC indoor network while satisfying users' traffic demands and maintaining an acceptable level of illumination. We utilize the column-generation method to obtain an ε-bounded solution. Several practical implementation issues are integrated with the proposed algorithm, including different configurations of light source and ways of resolving the interference among VLC links. Through extensive simulations, we show that our approach reduces the power consumption of the state-of-the-art VLC-based scheduling algorithms by more than 60% while maintaining the required illumination.