Optimal ALOHA-like random access with heterogeneous QoS guarantees for multi-packet reception aided visible light communications

Abstract

There is a paucity of random access protocols designed for alleviating collisions in visible light communication (VLC) systems where carrier sensing is hard to be achieved due to the directionality of light. To resolve the problem of collisions, we adopt the successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm to enable the coordinator to simultaneously communicate with multiple devices, which is referred to as the multi-packet reception (MPR) capability. However, the MPR capability could be fully utilized only when random access algorithms are accordingly designed. Considering the characteristics of the random access VLC system with SIC, we propose a novel effective capacity (EC)-based ALOHA-like random access algorithm for MPR-aided uplink VLC systems having heterogeneous quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Firstly, we model the VLC network as a conflict graph and derive the EC for each device. Then, we formulate the VLC QoS-driven random access problem as a saturation throughput maximization problem subject to multiple statistical QoS constraints. Finally, the resultant non-concave optimization problem (OP) is solved by a memetic search algorithm relying on invasive weed optimization and differential evolution (IWO-DE). We demonstrate that our derived EC expression matches the Monte Carlo simulation results accurately, and the performance of our proposed algorithm is competitive.

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