Elite User Clustering-Based Indoor Heterogeneous VLC Interference Management and Sub-Channel Allocation Strategy

The visible light communication (VLC) and wireless fidelity (WIFI) heterogeneous network is considered as a highly competitive candidate for the next generation indoor wireless communication. VLC provides high data rate as downlink transmission while WIFI can be supplied to achieve uplink transmission and make up for link interruptions caused by occlusion. Due to the dense distribution of VLC access points (APs), data rate of users is reduced by inter-cell interference (ICI) seriously, therefore, interference management (IM) is crucial to ensure user satisfaction. Meanwhile, as the number of users increases, in order to ensure the needs of users, reasonable resource allocation is required in such heterogeneous network. Hence, the center of the elite user clustering attracts its non-interfering users to join a cluster that is a user with good channel quality and high demand. And users in one cluster share resources by sub-channel reuse. In consideration of interference management and resource allocation, we investigated resource allocation based on elite users clustering for interference management in heterogeneous network, which is formulated as a throughput maximization problem, and a graph-based IM is proposed to solve it. Compared with the benchmark 1 and benchmark 2 on a rectangular layout and an irregular layout, the simulation results demonstrate that the throughput of the proposed elite user clustering algorithm is increased by 19.5% and 12%, the average user satisfaction ratio is increased by 14% and 9%, respectively.