Robust Cooperative Multicarrier Transmission Scheme for Optical Wireless Cellular Networks

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising technology to achieve high data rates in heterogeneous scenarios. However, VLC strongly depends on the existence of a line-of-sight (LoS) link between transmitter and receiver to guarantee a good data rate performance, which is often a condition that is difficult to satisfy in practice. In this letter, a novel cooperative multicarrier transmission scheme is proposed, where neighboring attocells smartly cooperate to decrease the probability of blockage in the LoS link. This approach is compared to single-cell transmission schemes, obtaining notable gains in both received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and cell data rate when blockage of the LoS link occurs toward the nearest base station.