The evolving explosion in high data rate services and applications will soon require the use of untapped, abundant unregulated spectrum of the visible light for communications to adequately meet the demands of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile technologies. Radio-frequency (RF) networks are proving to be too scarce to cover the escalation in data rate services. Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a great potential solution, either in replacement of, or a complement to, existing RF networks, to support the projected traffic demands. Despite the prolific advantages of VLC networks, VLC faces many challenges that must be resolved in the near future to achieve full standardization and to be integrated to future wireless systems. Here, we review the emerging research in the field of VLC networks and lay out the challenges, technological solutions, and future work predictions. Specifically, we first review the VLC channel capacity derivation and discuss the performance metrics and the associated variables. The optimization of VLC networks are also discussed, including resources and power allocation techniques, user-to-access point (AP) association and APs-to-clustered-users-association, APs coordination techniques, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) VLC networks, simultaneous energy harvesting and information transmission using the visible light, and the security issues in VLC networks. Finally, we propose several open research problems to optimize the various VLC networks by maximizing either the sum rate, fairness, energy efficiency, secrecy rate, or harvested energy.
This paper provides, in Section II, an overview of VLC technology, defines and discusses the objectives and constraints that must be taken into account when optimizing VLC networks. Special emphasis is placed on channel capacity derivations, and the unique properties of VLC. We also discuss the variables, parameters, and constraints having an impact on the performance of VLC networks. All optimization techniques are reviewed in Section III, including power and resource allocation, users-to-APs association, cell formation, and AP cooperation used for mitigating the disadvantages of VLC networks to improve performance. This important topic was previously investigated by Li @cite_202 . However, their study was focused on the difference between user-centric and network-centric cell formations, and the interference reduction techniques, whereas in this paper, we place our attention on the techniques, used in RF VLC and in VLC standalone networks, that are aimed at alleviating the limitations in VLC networks. In other words, we show how to formulate optimization problems, what are the techniques used for solving these optimization problems, how the different objectives, limitations, constraints are evaluated, and how added RF APs can remove stand-alone VLC network limitations.
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In order to counteract the explosive escalation of wireless tele-traffic, the communication spectrum has been gradually expanded from the conventional radio frequency (RF) band to the optical wireless (OW) domain. By integrating the classic RF band relying on diverse radio techniques and optical bands, the next-generation heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are expected to offer a potential solution for supporting the ever-increasing wireless tele-traffic. Owing to its abundant unlicensed spectral resources, visible light communications (VLC) combined with advanced illumination constitute a competent candidate for complementing the existing RF networks. Although the advantages of VLC are multi-fold, some challenges arise when incorporating VLC into the classic RF HetNet environments, which may require new system architectures. The user-centric (UC) design principle for VLC environments constitutes a novel and competitive design paradigm for the super dense multi-tier cell combinations of HetNets. The UC concept may be expected to become one of the disruptive techniques to be used in the forthcoming fifth-generation era. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of visible-light-aided OW systems with special emphasis on the design and optimization of VLC networks, where the radically new UC design philosophy is reviewed. Finally, design guidelines are provided for VLC systems.