Resource allocation in optical wireless networks

In this paper, self-organising interference management for optical wireless networks deployed inside an aircraft cabin is investigated. A user that has successfully received data in a given frame and intends to continue receiving data in the next frame broadcasts a busy burst (BB) in a time-multiplexed BB slot. A neighbouring access point (AP) that intends to reuse the reserved resource listens to the BB slot and infers (prior to transmission) the amount of co-channel interference (CCI) it could cause towards the user that has reserved the resource, provided that channel reciprocity holds. This is a vital information for an AP to decide without any central supervision whether to transmit or to defer the transmission to another time or frequency slot so as to limit CCI caused to the active link to a threshold value. Compared to using static resource partitioning for interference coordination, the proposed approach improves the median system throughput by 17%whilst delivering roughly the same throughput at the cell-edge. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the threshold parameter can be adjusted to tradeoff aggregate system throughput for user throughput at the cell-edge.