The advanced innovation of smartphones has led to the exponential growth of internet users which is expected to reach 71% of the global population by the end of 2027. This in turn has given rise to the demand for wireless data and internet devices that is capable of providing energy-efficient, reliable data transmission and high-speed wireless data services. Light-fidelity (LiFi), known as one of the optical wireless communication (OWC) technology is envisioned as a promising solution to accommodate these demands. However, the indoor LiFi channel is highly environment-dependent which can be influenced by several crucial factors (e.g., presence of people, furniture, random users' device orientation and the limited field of view (FOV) of optical receivers) which may contribute to the blockage of the line-of-sight (LOS) link.
In this thesis, it is investigated whether deep learning (DL) techniques can effectively learn the distinct features of the indoor LiFi environment in order to provide superior performance compared to the conventional channel estimation techniques (e.g., minimum mean square error (MMSE) and least squares (LS)). This performance can be seen particularly when access to real-time channel state information (CSI) is restricted and is achieved with the cost of collecting large and meaningful data to train the DL neural networks and the training time which was conducted offline. Two DL-based schemes are designed for signal detection and resource allocation where it is shown that the proposed methods were able to offer close performance to the optimal conventional schemes and demonstrate substantial gain in terms of bit-error ratio (BER) and throughput especially in a more realistic or complex indoor environment.
Performance analysis of LiFi networks under the influence of fixed and random blockers is essential and efficient solutions capable of diminishing the blockage effect is required. In this thesis, a CSI acquisition technique for a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided LiFi network is proposed to significantly reduce the dimension of the decision variables required for RIS beamforming. Furthermore, it is shown that several RIS attributes such as shape, size, height and distribution play important roles in increasing the network performance. Finally, the performance analysis for an RIS-aided realistic indoor LiFi network are presented. The proposed RIS configuration shows outstanding performances in reducing the network outage probability under the effect of blockages, random device orientation, limited receiver's FOV, furniture and user behavior.
Establishing a LOS link that achieves uninterrupted wireless connectivity in a realistic indoor environment can be challenging. In this thesis, an analysis of link blockage is presented for an indoor LiFi system considering fixed and random blockers. In particular, novel analytical framework of the coverage probability for a single source and multi-source are derived. Using the proposed analytical framework, link blockages of the indoor LiFi network are carefully investigated and it is shown that the incorporation of multiple sources and RIS can significantly reduce the LOS coverage blockage probability in indoor LiFi systems
