Combination of visible light and radio frequency bands for device-to-device communication

Future mobile networks are supposed to serve high data rates to users. To accommodate the high data rates, a direct communication between nearby mobile terminals (MTs) can be exploited. This type of communication in mobile networks is known as Device-to-device (D2D). Furthermore, a communication in high frequency bands, such as, visible light communication (VLC), is also foreseen as an enabler for the high data rates. In a conventional D2D communication, pairs of the communicating MTs should reuse the same frequencies to maximize spectral efficiency of the system. However, this implies either interference among the D2D pairs or a need for complex resource allocation algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a new concept for D2D communication combining VLC and RF technologies in order to maximize capacity of the system. The objective of this paper is to analyze operational limits of the proposed concept and to assess potential capacity gains to give motivation for future research in this area. Thus, we also discuss several practical issues related to the proposed RF-VLC D2D concept and outline major research challenges. The performance analysis carried out in this paper shows that the RF-VLC D2D is able to improve the capacity in an indoor scenario by a factor of 4.1 and 1.5 when compared to standalone RF D2D and VLC D2D, respectively.