A Wireless Optical Backhaul Solution for Optical Attocell Networks
Abstract: The problem of backhauling for optical atto cell networks has been approached by a number of wired solutions such as in-building power line communication (PLC), Ethernet and optical fiber. In this paper, an alternative solution is proposed based on wireless optical communication in visible light and infrared (IR) bands. A thorough analysis of signal to- interference-plus-noise (SINR) is elaborated for a multi-user optical attocell network based on direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) and decode-andforward (DF) relaying, taking into account the effects of inter-backhaul and backhaul-to-access interferences. Inspired by concepts developed for radio frequency (RF) cellular networks, full-reuse visible light (FR-VL) and in-band visible light (IB-VL) bandwidth allocation policies are proposed to realize backhauling in the visible light band. The transmission power is opportunistically minimized to enhance the backhaul power efficiency. For a two-tier FR-VL network, there is a technological challenge due to the limited capacity of the bottleneck backhaul link. The IR band is employed to add an extra degree of