Energy efficient visible light communications relying on amorphous cells

In this paper, we design an energy efficient indoor Visible Light Communications (VLC) system from a radically new perspective based on an amorphous user-to-network association structure. Explicitly, this intriguing problem is approached from three inter-linked perspectives, considering the cell formation, link-level transmission and system-level optimisation, critically appraising the related optical constraints. To elaborate, apart from proposing hitherto unexplored Amorphous Cells (A-Cells), we employ a powerful amalgam of Asymmetrically Clipped Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) and transmitter pre-coding aided Multi-Input Single-Output (MISO) transmission. As far as the overall systemlevel optimisation is concerned, we propose a low-complexity solution dispensing with the classic Dinkelbach’s algorithmic structure. Our numerical study compares a range of different cell formation strategies and investigates diverse design aspects of the proposed A-Cells. Specifically, our results show that the A-Cells proposed are capable of achieving a much higher energy efficiency per user compared to that of the conventional cell formation for a range of practical Field of Views (FoVs) angles

Enhancing Coexistence in the Unlicensed Band with Massive MIMO

We consider cellular base stations (BSs) equipped with a large number of antennas and operating in the unlicensed band. We denote such system as massive MIMO unlicensed (mMIMO-U). We design the key procedures required to guarantee coexistence between a cellular BS and nearby Wi-Fi devices. These include: neighboring Wi-Fi channel covariance estimation, allocation of spatial degrees of freedom for interference suppression, and enhanced channel sensing and data transmission phases. We evaluate the performance of the so-designed mMIMO-U, showing that it allows simultaneous cellular and Wi-Fi transmissions by keeping their mutual interference below the regulatory threshold. The same is not true for conventional listen-before-talk (LBT) operations. As a result, mMIMO-U boosts the aggregate cellular-plus-Wi-Fi data rate in the unlicensed band with respect to conventional LBT, exhibiting increasing gains as the number of BS antennas grows.Comment: To appear in Proc. IEEE ICC 201