Anticipatory Association for Indoor Visible Light Communications: Light, Follow Me!

In this paper, a radically new anticipatory perspective is taken into account when designing the user-to-access point (AP) associations for indoor visible light communications (VLC) networks, in the presence of users’ mobility and wireless-traffic dynamics. In its simplest guise, by considering the users’ future locations and their predicted traffic dynamics, the novel anticipatory association prepares the APs for users in advance, resulting in an enhanced location- and delay-awareness. This is technically realized by our contrived design of an efficient approximate dynamic programming algorithm. More importantly, this paper is in contrast to most of the current research in the area of indoor VLC networks, where a static network environment was mainly considered. Hence, this paper is able to draw insights on the performance trade-off between delay and throughput in dynamic indoor VLC networks. It is shown that the novel anticipatory design is capable of significantly outperforming the conventional benchmarking designs, striking an attractive performance trade-off between delay and throughput. Quantitatively, the average system queue backlog is reduced from 15 to 8 [ms], when comparing the design advocated to the conventional benchmark at the per-user throughput of 100 [Mbps], in a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$15\times 15\times 5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> [<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{m}^{3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>] indoor environment associated with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ 8\times 8$ </tex-math></inline-formula> APs and 20 users walking at 1 [m/s].