User-Centric Networking for Indoor Visible Light Communication Systems: A Spectral Clustering-Based Approach

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) technology has emerged as a promising solution to address the stringent requirements of indoor industrial communication scenarios, such as the dynamic capacity requirements of smart factory. However, the inevitable deployment of ultra-dense VLC access points introduces new challenges for VLC user equipments, including difficulties related to interference control, resource allocation, and intercell handover. Motivated by these, this article proposes a user-centric networking strategy tailored for indoor VLC systems. The proposed algorithm initiates by tackling system-wide interference mitigation through the use of spectral clustering to partition the network, thereby minimizing intersubnetwork interference. Subsequently, orthogonal subchannel allocation within each subnetwork is employed, along with subchannel multiplexing across subnetworks. Simulations demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods, showcasing superior performance in terms of achievable rates compared to benchmarks.