Resource Allocation Under Delay-Guarantee Constraints for Heterogeneous Visible-Light and RF Femtocell

The resource-allocation (RA) problems of mobile terminals (MTs) are investigated in a heterogeneous wireless network, where both a visible light communication system and an RF femtocell system are deployed in a room. We consider diverse quality-of-service requirements in terms of the data rate, fairness, and statistical delay requirements. Inspired by the concept of effective capacity, we formulate our optimization problems applying α-proportional fairness while satisfying specific statistical delay constraints. Two types of MTs, namely, multihoming MTs and multimode MTs, are considered, where multihoming MTs have the capability of aggregating resources from different networks, whereas the multimode MTs always select a single network for their connection. Our optimization procedure solves the RA probability problem for multihoming MTs with the aid of a decentralized algorithm. By contrast, our optimization problem involves both network selection and RA probability optimization for multimode MTs, which may be regarded as a mixed-integer nonlinear problem. Since this problem is computationally intractable, a suboptimal decentralized method is proposed for solving it. Simulation results are also presented for clarifying the performance of the proposed algorithm. It is shown that the multimode MTs are capable of achieving similar performance to that of the multihoming MTs when the statistical delay requirements are loose. However, as expected, the multihoming MTs attain a better performance when we tighten the delay requirements.