Performance of indoor optical femtocell by visible light communication

Femotocell has been proposed and deployed to improve the indoor coverage and capacity of a cellular network. One big challenge in its deployment is the interference between the macrocell and femtocell cellular networks. In this paper we propose a new physical layer for the implementation of indoor femtocells – optical femtocells by LED-based visible light communication. A general system structure of the indoor optical femtocell network is first introduced. A combined wavelength division and code division multiple access scheme is proposed to differentiate cells and multiple users within a cell. This scheme coupled with directional beaming characteristics of the LEDs helps to mitigate intercell interference and intracell inference. The communication performance adopting the dimming compatible variable-PPM modulation suggested by the IEEE standard is analyzed. Monte-Carlo simulation is then carried out to reveal the system performance numerically under typical system settings and effects of various parameters.