Design of Energy Efficient Hybrid VLC/RF/PLC Communication System for Indoor Networks

Integrating visible light communication (VLC) system with indoor radio frequency (RF) network is seen as a possible way of increasing the capacity and coverage of indoor networks. In such a hybrid network, the traffic generated at the indoor RF and VLC access points must be backhauled to the core network. Power line communication (PLC) technology is seen as a cost-effective backhaul (BH) solution due to its infrastructure availability in every home. In this letter, a novel system model that captures the joint effect of power and BH flow optimization for hybrid VLC/RF/PLC indoor communication network is proposed. For the proposed system model, the problem of energy efficiency (EE) maximization via power and BH flow optimization is formulated as a non-convex problem, and then transformed into a convex problem via the Dinkelbach's approach. An energy efficient algorithm is proposed to solve this joint problem with guaranteed optimality. Simulation results are used to verify the superiority of the proposed hybrid VLC/RF/PLC system and algorithm over a conventional indoor RF system and equal power allocation benchmark scheme, respectively, in terms of network throughput, power consumption, and EE.