Energy Efficiency Optimization for Rate-Splitting Multiple Access-Based Indoor Visible Light Communication Networks

With the explosive proliferation of connected devices and mobile users in the Internet-of-things, multiple access techniques are urged to be developed for the next generation wireless communications. Recently, rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has been a promising communication technology that holds advantages of strong robustness, low complexity, and high spectral efficiency, which can be integrated with the indoor visible light communication (VLC) broadcast system to compensate for the shortcomings of limited modulation bandwidth of LEDs. However, the research on the RSMA-based VLC systems is still in its infancy and there exist various problems to be explored. To benefit from the RSMA technique, this paper investigates the energy efficiency optimizations for both single-cell and multi-cell RSMA-based VLC broadcast systems. Specifically, these two systems are modeled, where the VLC broadcast channel follows Lambertian radiation model, and the splitting design and successive interference cancellation of RSMA are employed to mitigate the multi-user interference. Especially for multi-cell networks, the zero-forcing approach is adopted to eliminate the inter-cell interference. To maximize the energy efficiency, the precoding and power allocation problems are formulated for single-cell and multi-cell networks while accommodating multiple constraints including dynamic operation ranges of LEDs, QoS requirements, and interference elimination. For solving these non-convex fractional problems, two pieces of successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithms are proposed, in which the variable transformation and linear approximation are adopted. Simulation results indicate that the proposed schemes can achieve superior energy efficiency with fast convergence for various network loads and user deployments.