Inter-cell interference mitigation in multi-cellular visible light communications

Inter-cell interference hinders multi-cellular optical wireless communication to support various applications. We proposed and experimentally demonstrated a multicarrier-based cell partitioning scheme, combined with frequency reuse, which could be effective in optical communications although it is inefficient in RF wireless communications. For multicarrier-based cell partitioning, Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based multiple access (OFDMA) was employed to accommodate multi-cellular optical wireless communications without a large guard band between adjacent cells and without additional RF components. Moreover, we employed filter bank-based multicarrier (FBMC) to mitigate inter-cell interference generated in OFDMA-based cell partitioning due to asynchronous signals originated from RF path difference. By using FBMC-based cell partitioning, inter-cell interference could be effectively mitigated as well as capacity and spectral efficiency were improved about 1.5 times compared to those of OFDMA. Because no cyclic prefix (CP) is required in FBMC, the improvement factor could be increased if there is a large RF path difference between lighting cells. Moreover, it could be a stronger solution when many neighboring cells exist causing large interference. The proposed multicarrier-based cell partitioning combined with FBMC will effectively support visible light communication (VLC)-based localization-based services (LBS) and indoor positioning system by transparently providing trilateration-based positioning method.