Centralized Light Access Network (C-LiAN): A Novel Paradigm for Next Generation Indoor VLC Networks

Visible light communication (VLC) builds upon the idea of using existing lighting infrastructure for wireless data transmission. In a conventional VLC network, each light fixture acts as an access point (AP) which are connected to each other through electrical grid as well as data backbone. These VLC-enabled fixtures consist baseband unit (BBU) followed by the optical front-end (OFE). In this paper, we propose the so-called centralized light access network (C-LiAN) which aggregates all AP computational resources into a central pool that is managed by a centralized controller. Unlike the distributed architecture where each light fixture performs both baseband processing and optical transmission/reception, the centralized architecture employs 'dummy' fixtures with a VLC OFE. Moving the baseband processing to a central pool reduces the associated cost and complexity of each VLC-enabled LED luminary. It further enables joint processing of signals from different APs making possible an efficient implementation of joint processing, offloading, handover, interference management, scheduling, and resource management algorithms. As an example to demonstrate the virtues of C-LiAN, we further present the performance of coordinated multi-point transmission and enhanced inter-cell interference coordination with almost blank subframe techniques originally proposed for Long Term Evolution-Advanced in the context of indoor VLC networks.