Efficient Exploitation of Radio Frequency and Visible Light Communication Bands for D2D in Mobile Networks

Abstract

The concept of device-to-device (D2D) communication, combining common radio frequency (RF) and visible light communication (VLC), is seen as a feasible way how to cope with spectrum crunch in the RF domain and how to maximize spectral efficiency in general. In this paper, our objective is to decide when RF should be utilized or if VLC proves to be the more profitable option. The selection between RF and VLC is defined as a multi-objective optimization problem targeting primarily to minimize the outage ratio while the secondary objective is to maximize the sum capacity of D2D pairs, composed by D2D transmitters and D2D receivers. To solve this problem, we design a centralized low-complexity heuristic algorithm selecting either RF or VLC band for each D2D pair relying on the mutual interference among the pairs. For interpretation of the mutual interference among the D2D pairs, we exploit directed weighted graphs adopted from the graph theory. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of the outage ratio, sum capacity and average energy efficiency. What is more, despite a very low complexity, the proposed algorithm reaches a close-to-optimum performance provided by the exhaustive search algorithm.